LIBRARY 


.-rTY  OF 

CAL'1--       :A 
SAN  DfEC  i 


KITCHENER 


EARL  KITCHENER  OF  KHARTOUM 
In  Field  Marshal's  Uniform 


ORGANIZER  OF  VICTORY 

BY 

HAROLD  BEGBIE 

WITH   PORTRAITS 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  3VOFFLIN  COMPANY 

Ofte  fitoetjfibe  ptes 
1915 


COPYRIGHT,   1915,  BY  HAROLD  BEGBIE 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Published  February  iqty 


He  came  at  the  right  hour,  and  he  was  the  right  man. 

G.  W.  STBKVKNS. 


CONTENTS 

I.  FOREWORD 1 

II.  OUR  ENGLISH  HERO  is  BORN  AN  IRISH- 
MAN AND  BECOMES  A  FRENCHMAN       .  6 

HI.  KITCHENER  BECOMES  A  FRENCHMAN,  BUT 
is  PRUSSIANIZED  BACK  INTO  PERMA- 
NENT ENGLISH 15 

IV.  THE  CAREER  IN  BRIEF 19 

V.  STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER     ....  25 

VI.  THE  KITCHENER  LEGEND                 .      .  44 

VII.  AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE     .      .      .  .50 

VIII.  KITCHENER'S  BATTLES  .      .      ...  67 

IX.  THE  MAN  HIMSELF              ....  90 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

EARL   KITCHENER   OF  KHARTOUM   IN   FIELD   MAR- 
SHAL'S UNIFORM Frontispiece 

From  a  photograph  by  Bassano,  London. 

HORATIO  HERBERT  KITCHENER  AS  A  CADET  AT  THE 
ROYAL  MILITARY  ACADEMY,  WOOLWICH  ...    12 

From  a  photograph. 

KITCHENER  AT  TWENTY-EIGHT         26 

At  this  time  (1878),  Kitchener  was  employed  by  the 
Palestine  Exploration  Fund. 
From  a  photograph. 

LORD  KITCHENER  WITH  HIS  STAFF,  IN  INDIA     .      .    40 

From  a  photograph  by  Messrs.  Wiele  &  Klein. 

LORD  KITCHENER  LEAVING  THE  WAR  OFFICE    .      .    60 

From  a  photograph  by  the  London  News  Agency. 

LORD  KITCHENER  AS  SIRDAR 68 

(Commander-in-chief  of  the  Egyptian  Army) 
From  a  photograph  by  Dittrich. 

LORD  KITCHENER 94 

From  a  photograph  by  Cribb,  Southsea. 

LORD  KITCHENER  IN  HIS  ACADEMIC  GOWN  .      .      .  100 

From  a  photograph. 


KITCHENER 

CHAPTER  I 

FOREWORD 

SELDOM  has  any  one  man  stood  for  a  multi- 
tudinous and  highly  complex  nation  with  so 
tremendous  and  complete  an  emphasis  as  Lord 
Kitchener  stood  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  for 
the  British  nation. 

He  was  not  an  incarnation  of  the  people,  he 
did  not  express  the  total  character  of  the  nation; 
but  with  a  force  hardly  ever  equalled  in  our  his- 
tory he  became  the  Mood  of  the  British  people, 
the  living  expression  of  the  Will  of  the  entire 
British  Empire. 

During  the  disembarkation  of  our  troops  in 
France  a  British  sergeant,  talking  to  a  newspaper 
correspondent,  said  that  the  British  soldier  is  the 
most  cheerful,  humorous,  and  kind-hearted  per- 
son in  the  world,  "but,"  said  he,  "Tommy  can 
look  cruel  when  he  is  roused."  At  that  moment 
a  young  trooper,  fresh-faced  and  smiling,  found 
himself  in  trouble  with  a  bunch  of  horses;  in  a 
second  he  slipped  from  the  numnah,  got  a  short 
hold  of  the  reins,  and  jagged  the  restive  chargers 

1 


KITCHENER 

into  obedient  docility.  As  he  turned  his  head, 
his  young  face  was  flushed,  his  jaws  were  set, 
and  his  eyes  had  a  glint  of  cruelty.  The  sergeant 
said  to  the  newspaper  correspondent,  "See  that? 
Well,  that's  what  I  mean." 

It  was  this  Mood  of  the  Nation  that  Lord 
Kitchener  so  completely  represented  and  so 
swiftly  expressed  at  the  beginning  of  the  war. 
He  was  Britain  looking  cruel.  He  was  the  Eng- 
lishman with  his  blood  up.  He  was  the  nation 
suddenly  jerked  into  the  realization  that  every- 
thing said  of  Germany  by  even  the  most  ex- 
travagant Germanophobes  was  entirely,  shock- 
ingly, incredibly  true.  "The  Day"  had  dawned. 
Honour  was  publicly  thrown  aside  by  the  Prus- 
sian Government.  Truth  was  openly  derided  by 
these  apostles  of  Force.  And,  to  complete  the 
awakening,  the  natural  and  amazed  indignation 
of  the  civilized  world  at  broken  treaties  and  dis- 
owned obh'gations  was  characterized  by  the  Ger- 
mans as  hypocrisy. 

In  a  moment,  the  blood  of  the  Englishman  was 
up.  He  realized  his  danger.  He  sprang  to  his 
feet,  clenching  his  fists,  and  he  looked  cruel.  No 
other  man  of  our  time  could  so  vigorously  and 
ruthlessly  have  represented  this  particular  mood 
of  the  British  people,  this  one  aspect  of  the  na- 
tional temperament,  as  Kitchener  of  Khartoum. 

2 


FOREWORD 

Lord  Kitchener,  as  the  reader  of  this  little 
book  will  discover,  is  neither  the  Machine  nor 
the  Ogre  of  popular  imagination.  He  is  perfectly 
human.  There  is,  indeed,  something  frank,  boy- 
ish, and  rough-humoured  in  his  disposition.  He 
is  shy,  and  he  has  moments  when  he  craves  for 
sympathy.  All  the  same  he  does  not  represent 
the  British  character  in  any  of  its  most  amiable 
qualities.  He  stands  absolutely  for  the  nation 
just  now,  but  he  is  not  the  highest,  the  best,  not 
even  the  most  likeable  of  English  types.  Un- 
roused  he  is  the  deliberate,  work-loving,  brusque, 
quite  unimaginative,  and  very  thorough  British 
administrator:  roused,  he  is  the  jaws  of  the  bull- 
dog. 

When  it  was  announced  in  the  tense  moments 
at  the  declaration  of  war,  that  Lord  Kitchener 
was  to  take  into  his  hands  the  administration  of 
the  army,  the  whole  British  nation  —  it  is  no 
exaggeration  to  say  it  —  breathed  again.  His 
instant  demand  for  500,000  men  did  not  alarm 
or  infuriate  a  peace-loving  nation;  it  spread,  af- 
ter the  first  shock,  a  feeling  of  safety.  His  prep- 
aration for  a  war  of  three  years  did  not  shock  the 
national  conscience;  it  sensibly  relieved  anxiety 
and  settled  people's  thoughts.  In  "K.  of  K." 
the  nation  saw  not  only  a  great  organizer  of 
victory,  but  its  own  fierce  mood,  its  own  tena- 

3 


KITCHENER 

cious  will,  its  own  enduring  strength,  its  own 
multiplied,  world-flung,  and  historic  spirit.  By 
one  of  those  mysterious  intuitions  of  democracy, 
which  sweep  like  lightning  through  myriads  of 
people,  and  which  are  sometimes,  not  always, 
more  to  be  trusted  than  the  nice  and  careful 
judgments  of  discriminating  intelligence,  Kitch- 
ener stood  in  the  confidence  of  the  nation  as 
the  one  absolute  unchallengeable  man  for  the 
storm  which  had  broken  with  such  bewildering 
suddenness  upon  the  drowsiness  of  its  domestic 
life. 

A  sketch  of  his  character,  it  is  hoped,  —  al- 
though it  be  a  perfectly  frank  and  critical  piece 
of  work,  —  will  deepen  and  sustain  that  con- 
fidence through  the  days  ahead,  when  the  gentle 
and  the  kind,  as  well  as  the  weak  and  the  pusil- 
lanimous, are  perhaps  tempted  to  cry  for  too 
early  a  mercy,  too  hazardous  a  peace.  Lord 
Kitchener  may  not  stand  for  Christianity;  but 
he  does  stand  for  the  mills  of  God.  He  may  not 
represent  the  sweetness  and  grace  of  British 
civilization;  but  he  does  represent  the  righteous 
indignation  of  the  British  people  when  its  path 
is  challenged  by  savage  barbarism  and  a  philo- 
sophical but  truculent  atheism.  When  he  tells 
us  we  may  let  go  our  grip,  civilization  may  turn 
from  the  destruction  of  war  to  the  reconstruction 

4 


FOREWORD 

of  peace  with  the  sure  and  certain  hope  that  the 
heirs  of  Nietzsche,  the  sons  of  Treitschke,  the 
blood-stained  legions  of  Attila,  will  never  more 
lay  upon  the  back  of  social  reformation  a  burden 
of  intolerable  militarism  and  never  more  darken 
the  green  and  pleasant  fields  of  humanity  with 
the  shadow  of  hateful  war.  But  till  Kitchener 
cries  "ENOUGH!"  the  British  Empire  —  so  slow 
to  anger,  so  unswaggering,  so  peace-loving,  and 
so  un-Prussian  —  must  strike  till  the  dust  is  red. 

When  Kitchener  relaxes  the  grip  of  his  clenched 
hands  the  neck  of  the  Prussian  eagle  will  be 
broken,  and  only  then  will  the  great  nations  and 
the  small  nations  be  able  to  advance  into  the 
Promised  Land  of  which  Lord  Kitchener  perhaps 
has  not  even  permitted  himself  to  dream. 

One  sees  in  him,  then,  not  only  the  expression 
of  England  looking  cruel,  but  the  strength,  the 
determination,  and  the  practical  wisdom  of  those 
great  and  glorious  nations  with  whom  it  is  the 
honour  of  Great  Britain  to  be  allied.  At  the 
same  time  one  is  not  conscious  of  any  feeling 
towards  Kitchener  which  could  be  heightened 
into  hero-worship.  He  is  not  Civilization,  but 
the  servant  of  Civilization.  He  is  not  Progress, 
but  the  policeman  of  Progress.  One  employs  him 
with  admiration  and  rewards  him  with  gratitude. 
But  one  does  not  want  to  be  like  him. 


CHAPTER   II 

OUR  ENGLISH  HERO  IS  BORN  AN  IRISHMAN 
AND   BECOMES  A   FRENCHMAN 

IN  the  "hungry  forties,'*  a  retired  cavalry 
soldier  from  England  happened  to  be  in  Dublin 
during  the  sale  of  some  considerable  estates  in 
the  south  of  Ireland.  The  paltry  bidding  at  the 
auction  of  these  lands  tempted  the  hard-headed 
Englishman,  and  for  a  sum  of  £3000  he  bought 
a  number  of  rather  neglected  acres  in  the  two 
counties  of  Limerick  and  Kerry. 

This  retired  cavalry  soldier  was  Lieutenant- 
Colonel  Henry  Horatio  Kitchener.  He  had 
started  life  in  the  Foot,  had  seen  service  in  India, 
had  exchanged  into  the  cavalry,  and  now  was 
on  the  retired  list,  fairly  well  off,  full  of  energy, 
and  with  a  keen  eye  for  the  main  chance.  He 
was  married  to  an  Englishwoman,  the  daughter 
of  a  reverend  doctor  of  divinity  in  Suffolk,  one 
John  Chevallier,  an  old  and  dignified  family  in 
that  part  of  the  world,  but  of  Jersey  origin,  and 
therefore  French-blooded.  There  was  a  baby 
among  the  colonel's  impedimenta  when  he  came 
to  Ireland,  a  boy  named  Chevallier  Kitchener. 

Two  years  after  he  had  settled  on  his  Irish 

6 


BORN  AN  IRISHMAN 

estates,  that  is  to  say,  in  the  year  1850,  and  on 
the  pleasantest  day  of  the  year,  to  wit,  Mid- 
summer Day,  the  24th  of  June,  which  is  also  St. 
John's  Day,  another  son  was  added  to  the  col- 
onel's manage,  the  first  Irish-born  of  the  family, 
Horatio  Herbert  Kitchener.  In  due  course  three 
other  children  were  born  in  Ireland,  two  sons  and 
a  daughter,  forming  together  a  cheerful  and  com- 
fortable family  of  five,  the  baby  girl  a  delightful 
comfort  to  Mrs.  Kitchener  among  her  court  of 
strapping  masculinity. 

Papa  Kitchener  was  lord  of  that  household. 
He  had  bought  his  estates  not  for  pleasure  and 
not  for  display.  His  master-thought,  buzzing 
night  and  day  in  his  cold,  calculating  brain,  was 
how  to  turn  his  £3000  into  a  fortune.  He  went 
about  this  work  with  a  methodical  thoroughness 
which  manifested  itself  in  a  somewhat  mightier 
degree  and  certainly  on  a  more  glorious  field  when 
his  second  son  took  over  the  ancient  Kingdom  of 
Egypt.  He  was  up  early;  he  spent  the  greater 
part  of  the  day  in  the  saddle;  he  knew  the  quality 
of  every  field  on  his  estate;  he  hob-a-nobbed  with 
the  farmers ;  he  kept  himself  abreast  of  his  times 
in  the  matter  of  agricultural  science;  he  studied 
to  get  on.  He  bought  more  land;  reclaimed  bog 
and  wilderness;  set  up  a  brickworks  and  a  tile 
factory;  took  into  his  house  a  couple  of  pupils; 

7 


KITCHENER 

worked  everybody  about  him  from  morning  till 
night;  improved  the  breed  of  his  cattle;  cleaned 
his  fields  before  he  sowed  them;  introduced  new 
forms  of  drainage  and  irrigation;  lived  hard; 
lived  earnestly;  lived  usefully  if  not  amiably; 
and  was  soon  in  a  position  to  sell  parcels  of  land 
at  a  thousand  pounds  apiece,  and  the  rent  of  his 
estate  for  £14,000. 

It  may  be  imagined  that  this  vigorous  hus- 
bandman, his  eye  always  on  the  main  chance, 
had  small  time  for  such  subsidiary  considerations 
as  the  development  of  his  sons.  Mrs.  Kitchener 
was  left  very  much  to  shift  for  herself  in  a  rather 
shabby  and  noisy  household,  while  the  agricul- 
tural colonel  looked  over  the  brick  walls  of  his 
pig-styes,  into  his  whitewashed  cowsheds,  into 
his  sheep-pens,  and  into  his  stables,  every  power 
of  his  brain  concentrated  on  the  pleasant  work 
of  improving  his  horses,  his  sheep,  his  cows,  and 
his  pigs.  The  boys  were  to  be  improved,  too,  but 
no  doubt  Nature  might  be  trusted  in  that  de- 
partment of  the  farm.  They  were  his  sons;  they 
could  not  have  had  a  better  father;  if  they  went 
to  the  wall,  then,  by  Heaven,  the  wall  was  too 
good  for  them. 

On  one  occasion  Herbert  Kitchener  was 
brought  up  before  his  father  as  an  incorrigible 
idler.  He  was  told  that  if  he  did  not  work  at  his 

8 


BORN  AN  IRISHMAN 

books  he  should  be  apprenticed  to  a  hatter  — 
the  headgear  of  Papa  Kitchener  conveying  a 
sufficiently  grim  emphasis  to  this  infinite  con- 
tempt for  the  hat  trade.  That  was  Papa  Kitch- 
ener's part  in  the  business  of  education.  To 
the  genius  of  a  certain  Miss  Tucker  the  intellec- 
tual development  of  the  young  Kitcheners  was 
at  first  committed,  and  when  they  had  grown 
beyond  the  endurance  of  her  nerves,  they  vexed 
the  souls  of  a  tutor  or  two  for  a  brief  period,  and 
then  were  sent  to  a  Protestant  school  at  Kil- 
flynn,  kept  by  a  friend  of  the  family,  the  Rev- 
erend William  Raymond.  Those  who  know  any- 
thing of  the  South  of  Ireland  will  not  need  to  be 
told  that  the  Protestant  clergy  of  that  beautiful 
and  gentle  country,  whatever  their  other  virtues, 
are  not  stars  of  the  first  magnitude  in  the  matter 
of  scholarship.  One  would  not  go  to  them  for 
historical  information  or  for  inspiration  in  phi- 
losophy. However,  Herbert  Kitchener  certainly 
went  to  church,  and  as  certainly  graced  the  bench 
of  a  Sunday-school  class.  One  may  conjecture 
that  any  troublesome  Roman  heredity  derived 
from  dead  and  gone  Chevalliers  was  very  effec- 
tively extirpated  in  the  Sunday  school  of  the 
Reverend  William  Raymond;  whether  the  least 
of  the  elements  of  Christianity  were  taught  is 
another  matter. 

9 


KITCHENER 

But  Herbert  Kitchener's  chief  concern  in  those 
days  was  the  open  air  and  the  Atlantic  Ocean. 
He  loved  the  hedgerow,  he  loved  the  back  of  any 
old  horse,  and  he  loved  the  sea.  Latin  exercises 
and  lectures  on  the  popes  came  only  as  interrup- 
tions to  long  tramps  over  the  fields,  fine  gallops 
across  the  meadows,  fierce  joltings  in  a  tumbril 
down  the  country  lanes,  and  exulting  dives  from 
off  a  streaming  rock  into  the  cheerful  burly  of  the 
sea. 

If  he  did  not  shape  like  a  scholar,  at  any  rate 
he  shaped  like  a  man;  and,  tall  as  he  was  for  his 
years,  almost  gawky,  he  was  nothing  of  a  weed, 
being  thick-set,  straight-legged,  and  somewhat 
full  of  face.  But  for  a  certain  dignity  of  brow  and 
a  sharp,  vital,  challenging  look  in  his  blue  eyes, 
he  might  have  passed  for  a  farmer's  son,  his 
future  in  the  fields,  his  heaven  no  higher  than 
the  hunting-saddle.  There  was  a  smell  of  the 
gunroom  and  the  stables  about  the  Kitchener 
boys,  but  nothing  bucolic  in  their  appearance. 
They  hung  together,  did  not  mix  with  the  boys 
of  the  neighbourhood,  and  played  no  practical 
jokes  with  the  surrounding  farmers.  The  shyness 
which  in  after  life  was  imputed  to  K.  of  K.  for 
arrogance  was  a  Kitchener  characteristic.  But 
this  shyness  was  of  the  manful,  steady,  and  in- 
ward order;  there  was  nothing  shrinking  and 

10 


BORN  AN  IRISHMAN 

timid  in  its  nature:  its  expression  was  neither 
a  blush  nor  a  giggle.  The  Kitchener  boys  under- 
stood each  other  very  well;  they  felt  that  they 
did  not  understand  other  people.  When  other 
people  turned  up,  they  looked  on.  When  they 
were  alone  together  they  let  themselves  go,  but 
not  violently  or  foolishly.  It  is  said  that  they 
took  no  risks  in  their  sea-bathing,  to  the  scorn 
of  Irish  boys  in  bare  legs  and  freckles. 

As  a  remedy  for  the  increasing  perplexities  of 
his  domestic  situation,  Papa  Kitchener  con- 
ceived the  idea  of  bundling  off  his  sons  to  a  for- 
eign country.  Somehow  or  other  he  came  to  hear 
of  a  Reverend  J.  Bennett  living  at  Villeneuve 
in  Switzerland,  who  took  pupils  and  preached 
the  Gospel.  That  was  enough  for  Colonel  Kitch- 
ener. In  1863,  K.  of  K.  then  being  thirteen  years 
of  age,  the  boys  were  despatched  to  the  hillside 
of  the  Lake  of  Geneva  —  good,  solid,  Protestant 
ground.  Mrs.  Kitchener  was  left  with  her  only 
daughter.  The  colonel  could  now  keep  his  eye 
on  the  main  chance  without  distraction. 

Tragedy  befell  this  household  in  the  following 
year  of  1864,  for  Mrs.  Kitchener  passed  away 
from  the  gentle  and  familiar  pleasantness  of 
mother  earth  to  join  the  spirits  of  forgotten 
Chevalliers  in  another,  stranger  world.  The  boys 
worked  on  with  their  Protestant  tutor,  embarked 

11 


KITCHENER 

on  a  few  educational  travels,  and  then  returned 
to  the  British  Isles,  stopping  for  the  first  time 
in  their  lives  in  London,  where  an  army  crammer 
waited  to  finish  them  off  in  Kensington  Square. 

This  gentleman  was  another  Protestant  clergy- 
man, the  Reverend  George  Frost,  and  his  estab- 
lishment was  fairly  well  attended  by  young 
gentlemen  of  the  fortunate  classes.  Among  these 
lively  and  rejoicing  colts,  Herbert  Kitchener 
was  regarded  as  something  of  a  clodhopper.  He 
neither  shone  in  the  classroom  nor  scintillated 
under  the  midnight  skies.  His  fellows  looked 
upon  him  as  a  heavy,  plodding,  painstaking,  and 
unilluminating  oaf  —  a  man  without  pleasant- 
ness or  brilliance,  his  slow  feet  moving  stolidly 
along  the  fixed  and  formidable  groove  which 
culminates  in  a  club  armchair  and  a  pension. 
He  did  not  escape  the  usual  baiting  of  more  ir- 
responsible spirits.  "Why  don't  you  go  for  them 
when  they  rot  you?"  he  was  asked  by  a  fellow 
pupil.  His  answer,  contemptuous  enough,  was 
this:  "What  do  they  matter?"  But  this  baiting 
never  came  to  real  ragging.  Kitchener  might 
turn  a  deaf  ear  to  chaff;  he  would  not  have 
turned,  perhaps,  his  other  cheek  to  the  smiter. 

From  this  tutor  in  Kensington  Square,  Herbert 
Kitchener  passed  to  the  Royal  Military  Academy 
at  Woolwich  in  1868,  twenty  years  after  Charles 

12 


HORATIO   HERBERT  KITCHENER 
As  a  Cadet  at  the  Royal  Military  Academy,  Woolwich 


BORN  AN  IRISHMAN 

Gordon  had  entered  "the  shop"  with  his  won- 
derful soul  on  fire  for  every  kind  of  glory.  Noth- 
ing in  Herbert  Kitchener  created  passionate 
friendships  or  stirred  the  admiration  of  smaller 
men  among  the  cadets.  He  was  remarkable  for 
quickness  in  mathematics,  but  in  everything 
else  was  accounted  thick-headed,  —  a  slow  coach 
climbing  the  dull  hill  of  duty  which  has  no  dazzle 
of  adventure  at  the  crest.  He  chose  the  Royal 
Engineers  for  his  arm,  and  settled  down  to  the 
sober  and  staying  stride  of  the  British  sapper. 
He  studied  his  textbooks  with  "a  long  persis- 
tency of  purpose,"  and  attended  lectures  with  a 
solid  intention  to  learn  what  he  could.  No  cadet 
ever  gave  less  trouble  to  his  superiors.  He  was 
one  of  those  obstinate  young  Britons  who  mean 
to  get  on,  and  who  triumph  not  by  the  luck  of 
the  brain-centres  but  by  the  deliberate  and  stead- 
fast exercise  of  will-power.  He  made  his  brain  do 
what  his  spirit  wished  to  do,  the  one  or  two  bril- 
liant cells,  such  as  the  mathematical,  encourag- 
ing the  less  gifted  others  to  obey  their  master's 
bidding. 

Papa  Kitchener  was  in  France,  married  again 
and  living  pleasantly  at  Dinan.  There  came 
young  Herbert  in  1870  on  a  holiday  visit,  bring- 
ing his  textbooks  along  with  him.  Of  a  sudden 
the  straight  road  of  his  set  purpose  was  dazzled 

13 


KITCHENER 

by  a  great  light  —  the  light  of  adventure,  the 
blaze  of  war.  Prussia  and  France  came  to  grips. 
The  set  purpose  dwindled,  paled,  went  out  like 
a  match.  Our  "Woolwich  cadet  found  himself 
looking  into  a  light  that  was  like  the  glare  of  a 
furnace.  The  marshalling  of  the  legions  of  France 
beat  a  new  music  in  his  heart.  The  thunder  of 
cannon  broke  in  upon  the  conned  axioms  of  his 
textbooks  like  the  banging  of  an  iron  fist  on 
the  door  of  a  sleeper.  Troops  went  by,  trundling 
their  guns,  singing  the  "Marseillaise,"  their 
standards  fluttering  in  a  glitter  of  bayonets.  .  .  . 
Kitchener  went  off  and  offered  his  services  to 
the  French.  There  he  stood  before  them,  a  solid 
twenty  years  of  hale  manhood,  well  over  six  feet, 
broad-shouldered,  deep-chested,  straight-legged, 
and  hard  as  steel,  the  face  of  him  brown  as  sand, 
his  carriage  resolute,  his  brain  already  versed  in 
war  science,  his  body  already  disciplined,  his 
spirit  clamorous  for  a  fight.  Well,  they  did  not 
think  twice. 


CHAPTER  HI 

KITCHENER  BECOMES  A  FRENCHMAN,  BUT  IS  PRUS- 
SIANIZED  BACK  INTO   PERMANENT   ENGLISH 

SOME  men  enter  the  army  for  its  social  pleas- 
antness; some  because  the  chance  of  a  fight  is 
the  hunger  and  thirst  of  their  souls;  some  be- 
cause it  has  a  pension  at  the  end  of  it.  Kitchener 
went  to  Woolwich  because  his  father  wished  him 
to  be  a  soldier,  because  he  himself  thought  it 
offered  a  field  for  conscious  ambitions,  and  be- 
cause it  had  the  certainty  of  a  pension  at  the  end. 
War  no  more  entered  into  his  calculations  at  that 
period  than  swagger.  He  wanted  to  see  the  world, 
he  wanted  to  do  things,  and  he  wanted  to  be  safe 
for  the  future.  K.  of  K.'s  master-passion,  hardly 
to  be  called  a  passion  because  it  is  so  cold,  so 
bloodless,  so  impersonal,  and  so  empty  of  self- 
seeking,  is  ambition.  As  soon  as  he  had  got  his 
feet  in  youth,  as  soon  as  he  perceived  that  life 
is  a  struggle  for  existence,  as  soon  as  he  knew 
vitally  that  a  man  must  work  if  he  is  to  conquer, 
Kitchener  set  himself  to  get  on,  and  told  his 
brothers  he  meant  to  get  on.  But  this  desire  for 
success  was  impersonal  in  the  sense  that  he  did 
not  want  to  amass  wealth  or  to  win  popularity 

15 


KITCHENER 

or  to  live  with  the  thought  of  Westminster  Abbey 
in  his  soul.  He  wanted  success  because  he  wanted 
power.  He  wanted  power  because  it  was  his 
nature  to  exercise  power.  His  will  had  mastered 
a  slow  brain,  forcing  it  to  the  strange  and  un- 
congenial labour  of  book-learning;  his  will  was 
now  forcing  him  towards  power  because  that  was 
its  native  direction,  because  without  power  his 
life  would  be  a  frustrated  life. 

But  here  on  the  threshold  of  his  life,  our  pas- 
sionless and  deliberate  young  man  was  con- 
fronted by  glory,  and  he  threw  everything  aside 
to  run  and  embrace  this  temptress  of  youth, 
flinging  his  textbooks  aside,  careless  of  pensions, 
careless  of  life,  longing  only  for  the  one  splendid 
elation  of  danger  and  the  hazard  of  battle.  It  was 
his  first  deviation  from  the  set  path,  and  I  know 
of  no  other  in  the  years  that  followed. 

He  entered  the  French  Army,  and  was  with 
the  troops  that  pushed  up  towards  beleaguered 
Paris  under  General  Chanzy.  If  his  sudden  de- 
sire for  glory  had  been  a  substantial  part  of  his 
character  instead  of  a  mere  ebullition  of  youth, 
it  might  have  been  suppressed,  perhaps  torn  up 
by  the  roots,  in  the  first  few  months  of  his  cam- 
paigning. For  he  was  surrounded  on  all  sides 
by  the  most  valorous  and  passionate  troops  in 
Europe,  troops  whose  songs  on  the  march  tell  of 

16 


BECOMES  A  FRENCHMAN 

glory  and  immortality,  troops  whose  patriotism 
is  like  a  consuming  fire,  and  whose  onslaught  in 
battle  is  like  a  whirlwind.  The  young  English 
volunteer  serving  with  these  fine  and  fervorous 
troops,  serving,  too,  under  as  brave  and  debonair 
a  general  as  ever  wore  the  French  kepi,  saw  little 
on  that  march  towards  Paris  except  the  cold  and 
merciless  destruction  of  glory  by  the  hand  of 
something  called  science.  Vain  the  valour  of  the 
French,  vain  the  superb  elan  which  swept  them 
forward:  something  quite  cold  and  depressing, 
something  quite  passionless  and  deadly,  some- 
thing without  patriotism  and  without  war-songs, 
waited  for  these  children  of  glory  and  crushed 
them,  devastated  them,  wiped  them  out  of  the 
ranks  of  life.  Thus  at  the  very  dawn  of  his  ex- 
istence the  young  Kitchener  took  his  cold  douche 
at  the  hands  of  science,  and  never  afterwards  per- 
mitted his  mind  to  stray  from  the  set  path  lead- 
ing through  dullness  and  unsparing  labour  to  the 
exercise  of  power. 

War  had  made  him  a  French  soldier,  but  war 
as  the  Prussians  conducted  it  prevented  him  from 
becoming  a  Frenchman.  He  saw  that  there  was 
no  straight  and  certain  road  on  the  field  of  glory, 
and  went  back  from  the  ravaged  battle-ground 
of  France  to  his  textbooks  at  Woolwich,  his  mind 
Englished  once  again,  his  ambition  revived,  his 

17 


KITCHENER 

will  in  supreme  command.  They  say  that  he  came 
in  for  a  wigging  at  the  hands  of  the  Duke  of 
Cambridge  for  having  dared  to  serve  under  the 
tricolour;  and  the  old  Duke,  so  constant  a  wor- 
shipper at  St.  Anne's,  Soho,  was  not  a  pleasant 
person  to  face,  particularly  on  a  gouty  afternoon, 
in  the  gloom  of  the  old  War  Office.  If  Kitchener 
really  did  come  in  for  that  dressing-down,  we 
must  think  that  it  hurt,  particularly  as  he  re- 
turned from  the  stricken  field  after  a  sharp  at- 
tack of  pleurisy.  M.  Clermont  Ganneau,  a  com- 
panion of  his  after  years,  says  that  K.  of  K. 
stood  up  to  the  old  Duke  and  said,  "I  under- 
stood, sir,  that  I  should  not  be  wanted  for  some 
time;  I  don't  like  being  idle;  and  I  thought  per- 
haps I  might  learn  something."  We  wonder! 

Whether  he  stood  up  to  the  Duke,  and  whether 
he  ascended  in  a  French  balloon  during  the  war, 
one  thing  at  least  is  certain,  that  he  learned  a 
lesson  in  France  which  was  a  lesson  for  life.  He 
learned  the  value  of  science,  the  superiority  of 
purpose  and  precision  over  emotion  and  rapture; 
and,  this  lesson  chiming  with  his  natural  disposi- 
tion, he  returned  to  Woolwich  in  good  heart  for 
the  future  and  worked  like  a  dray-horse  till  he 
had  passed  his  examination  and  become  a  com- 
missioned sapper.  This  was  in  January,  1871, 
five  months  before  he  came  of  age. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  CAREER  IN   BRIEF 

IT  has  been  said  by  an  American,  to  whom  the 
present  writer  doffs  his  cap,  that  the  method  of 
Lord  Kitchener  may  be  expressed  in  the  phrase, 
—  "Silence  and  work  and  silence  —  and  then 
the  end." 

One  may  add  that  the  silence  is  justified  by 
the  character  of  the  work,  for  the  work  to  which 
Lord  Kitchener  has  mostly  laid  his  powerful  and 
patient  hand  belongs  to  the  order  of  labour  about 
which  humanity  is  excusably  incurious.  Many 
things  have  to  be  done  in  this  world  which  are 
of  infinitely  more  service  to  the  progress  of  the 
human  race  than  the  work  of  poet  and  com- 
poser; but  it  is  impossible  to  rhapsodize  about 
these  beneficent  services,  hard  enough  to  be 
transiently  interested  in  their  existence.  I  have 
often  wondered  what  an  engineer  from  the  Sudan 
or  a  soldier  from  the  Khyber  Pass  must  think  of 
the  fluttering  excitement  in  a  London  drawing- 
room  when  some  popular  actor,  or  some  noto- 
rious lady  who  has  acquired  "the  habit  of  the 
divorce  court,"  makes  an  imposing  entrance. 
But  one  learns  after  painful  experience  that  the 

19 


KITCHENER 

actor  and  the  lady  are  really  and  truly  more 
interesting  than  the  engineer  and  the  soldier  — 
worse  still,  one  often  yawns  when  the  engineer  is 
talking  and  wishes  the  soldier  at  Tipperary  be- 
fore he  has  got  his  second  wind. 

Kitchener's  work  has  been  dull.  He  was  a 
lieutenant  in  the  Royal  Engineers  in  1871,  and 
himself  found  the  performance  of  those  duties  so 
tedious  that  in  1874  he  went  surveying  in  Pales- 
tine. Here  one  might  hope  for  romance,  and  here 
indeed  he  was  twice  in  peril  of  his  life,  but  on  the 
whole  he  spent  four  years  in  drawing  maps,  and 
you  may  draw  the  most  accurate  and  monumen- 
tal maps  in  the  world  without  inspiring  any  con- 
temporary poet  to  sing  your  praises  to  posterity. 

Then  Kitchener  went  to  Egypt,  and  began  to 
organize  a  force  of  native  cavalry.  Dull  work 
again  —  dull,  plodding,  unexciting  work,  work 
over  which  the  world  gladly  draws  the  curtain 
of  silence,  with  no  desire  to  peer  behind  the 
scenes.  Then  he  took  in  hand  the  delimitation 
of  some  tiresome  boundary,  and  was  presently 
appointed  Governor-General  of  the  Red  Sea 
Littoral  —  a  title  which  very  successfully  warns 
off  public  interest.  Then  he  built  railways,  raised 
armies,  organized  the  business  side  of  war,  and 
presently  discharged  victorious  cannon  at  the 
gates  of  Khartoum. 

20 


THE  CAREER  IN  BRIEF 

That  was  "the  End."  Silence  girded  up  its 
loins  and  skedaddled  for  its  life.  The  world  was 
filled  with  the  clamour  of  one  man's  name. 
Editors  tumbled  over  each  other  in  their  eager- 
ness to  find  out  everything  they  could  concern- 
ing this  extraordinary  person  who  at  the  age  of 
forty-eight  had  done  something  which  reached 
back  in  time  for  its  historical  basis  to  the  days 
when  Joseph  stood  before  Pharaoh  and  Moses 
crowed  in  his  cradle  among  the  reeds  of  the 
Nile.  Here  was  a  new  Pyramid  in  Egypt.  And 
—  when  the  editors  came  to  ask  questions — a 
new  Sphinx.  No :  silence  and  work  and  silence  — 
and  then  the  end,  with  silence  falling  once  more 
upon  the  man  who  by  dull  and  wearisome  work 
had  rendered  possible  the  firework  set-piece  of 
the  End. 

Kitchener,  with  Lord  Cromer,  enjoys  the 
splendid  fame  of  standing  godfather  to  modern 
Egypt.  By  his  measured  preparations,  his  dogged 
perseverance,  and  his  incessant  hard  thinking 
in  a  straight  line  he  struck  that  sudden  and  shat- 
tering blow  at  Khartoum  which  gave  to  Lord 
Cromer  and  those  who  came  after  him  an  Egypt 
of  almost  infinite  promise.  The  end  is  so  splendid 
that  to  regard  it  only  in  passing,  as  a  sore-footed 
tourist  regards  a  masterpiece  on  the  long  walls  of 
the  Pitti  Palace,  is  to  find  one's  self  dazzled  and 

21 


KITCHENER 

blinded.  Modern  Egypt  is  one  of  the  wonders  of 
the  world,  and  Kitchener's  hand  is  dusty  and 
bruised  and  blood-stained  with  the  labour  of  that 
sublime  resurrection. 

After  a  brief  visit  to  London,  where  he  donned 
a  peer's  robes,  swallowed  a  deal  of  turtle  soup, 
listened  to  columns  of  poor  rhetoric,  and  snubbed 
innumerable  scintillating  lion-hunters,  Kitch- 
ener returned  to  his  work.  He  wanted  a  Gor- 
don College  and  a  Christian  Cathedral  at  Khar- 
toum, and  work  of  that  kind  pleased  him  better 
than  being  bored  by  the  intensely  interested  and 
overwhelmingly  admiring  mondaines  of  London. 
No  young  subaltern  ever  hurried  home  from 
India  to  the  sweet  shady  side  of  Pall  Mall  so 
furiously  as  K.  of  K.  turned  his  face  to  the  sand 
of  the  desert  and  the  stars  of  the  Arabian  waste. 

He  finished  his  dull  work  in  Egypt,  and  in  a 
year  was  setting  people's  minds  at  rest  in  Eng- 
land by  taking  over  the  staff  of  Lord  Roberts  in 
South  Africa.  With  Roberts  and  Kitchener  to 
take  charge  of  that  dreadful  and  rather  sordid 
war  —  a  war  consecrated  only  by  the  heroism  of 
the  warring  troops  on  either  side,  and  redeemed 
only  by  the  superb  act  of  statesmanship  which 
gave  to  the  Boers  not  merely  their  freedom  but 
the  idea  of  a  democratic  destiny  —  with  Roberts 
there  to  strike  swiftly  and  with  Kitchener  there 


THE  CAREER  IN  BRIEF 

to  organize  carefully,  no  one  in  England  doubted 
the  end. 

After  the  work  in  South  Africa,  Kitchener  was 
for  some  time  almost  the  war-cry  of  a  party  in 
the  House  of  Commons,  not  by  his  own  fault,  but 
much  to  his  damage.  There  are  people  in  Eng- 
land who  would  gladly  hand  over  to  Kitchener's 
will  the  entire  machinery  of  the  British  Empire. 
There  are  others  who  think  that  his  mind  is  so 
exclusively  the  mind  of  an  autocratic  organizer 
that  he  would  be  the  ruin  of  any  empire  in  which 
the  civil  power  was  not  absolutely  paramount. 
In  Germany  I  think  he  would  be  the  Chancellor, 
if  the  Emperor's  feelings  towards  the  divine  na- 
ture of  his  position  would  admit  a  man  of  really 
commanding  genius  to  stand  in  the  shadow  of 
the  throne.  In  England  no  man  doubts  that 
Kitchener  could  carry  to  a  successful  issue  any- 
thing to  which  he  put  his  hand.  And  so  "Kitch- 
ener" became  a  war-cry,  a  battle-ground  of 
dispute,  his  too  hurried  apotheosis  by  one  party 
encouraging  the  opposing  party  to  suggest  the 
fallibility  of  this  otherwise  very  useful  and  ca- 
pable servant  of  the  Crown. 

Kitchener  went  to  India.  His  dull  work  was 
resumed,  and  silence  fell  upon  him  again  until  for 
a  brief  moment  an  official  altercation  with  the 
Viceroy,  Lord  Curzon,  —  in  spite  of  Kitchener's 

23 


KITCHENER 

sincere  and  noble  friendship  for  the  beautiful 
Lady  Curzon,  —  set  people  talking  to  the  same 
tune:  Kitchener,  they  said,  ought  to  be  recalled 
and  put  in  sole  charge  of  the  British  War  Office 
with  an  absolute  discretion  to  do  what  he  would 
for  the  defence  of  the  Empire. 

From  India  he  returned  to  Egypt,  and  from 
Egypt  he  went  to  the  War  Office  —  one  of  the 
most  obstinately  and  obtusely  conservative  of 
men  becoming  the  colleague  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
and  Mr.  Winston  Churchill. 

Here  we  may  leave  him  for  the  moment,  only 
remarking  to  our  readers,  as  we  proceed  to  relate 
a  few  stories  of  his  career,  that  once  again  Kitch- 
ener takes  up  the  burden  of  dull,  laborious,  un- 
exciting work,  while  men  of  quicker  mind  and 
more  heroic  qualities,  like  Field  Marshal  French 
and  General  Smith-Dorrien,  cover  themselves 
with  glory  on  the  field  of  battle. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  the  grim  and  scowling  face 
of  Kitchener  streaming  on  its  beam  of  light  to 
the  sheet  of  the  cinematograph  —  not  the  face 
of  French  or  Smith-Dorrien  —  which  fills  the 
picture-palace  with  the  loudest,  fiercest,  and  most 
grateful  cheers. 


CHAPTER  V 

STORIES  OF   THE   CAREER 

ONE  of  Lord  Kitchener's  cousins,  a  member 
of  the  Staffordshire  Education  Committee,  has 
spoken  of  the  field  marshal's  military  begin- 
nings. 

He  managed  to  scramble  into  Woolwich;  he  was 
not  high  in  the  lists;  and  no  one  thought  anything 
about  him.  After  leaving  Woolwich  he  got  his  com- 
mission in  the  Royal  Engineers;  and  still  no  one 
thought  much  about  him.  He  got  his  first  move  up 
in  the  world  when  he  was  appointed  on  the  Palestine 
Survey,  and  here  he  learnt  how  to  manage  native 
soldiers,  and  acquired  a  great  deal  of  that  command 
over  men  which  to-day  distinguishes  him.  He  got 
that,  his  first  appointment,  because  some  one  was 
wanted  to  go  to  Palestine  and  take  photographs,  and 
it  was  this  knowledge  that  gave  Lord  Kitchener  the 
lift  up. 

So  far  as  I  can  discover  this  is  the  sole  refer- 
ence in  the  documents  to  Kitchener  as  an  ama- 
teur photographer. 

M.  Clermont  Ganneau,  an  archaeologist  who 
served  with  Kitchener  in  the  Palestine  Survey, 
describes  him  as  "a  good  fellow  in  the  fullest 
acceptance  of  the  word  .  .  .  capable  of  head- 
strong acts  ...  a  frank  and  most  outspoken 

25 


KITCHENER 

character  with  recesses  of  winsome  freshness. 
His  high  spirits  and  cheeriness  formed  an  agree- 
able contrast  to  the  serious  grave  character  of 
some  of  his  comrades."  After  this  blow  at  the 
popular  idea,  M.  Ganneau  proceeds:  "Kitch- 
ener's ardour  for  his  work  astonished  us.  He 
drew  up  excellent  maps,  but  he  did  not  confine 
himself  to  cartographic  labours.  Gradually  he 
began  to  take  an  interest  in  archaeological  dis- 
coveries, and  acquired  in  these  matters  a  marked 
proficiency." 

This  last  sentence  is  useful  to  the  student  of 
Kitchener's  career;  M.  Ganneau  enables  us  to 
see  that  Kitchener  from  the  first  was  a  laborious 
and  pertinacious  worker.  He  gradually  took  an 
interest  in  the  real  object  of  the  mission,  and 
acquired  in  this  entirely  new  field  for  his  energy 
a  proficiency  which  even  an  expert  remarks. 

Kitchener  is  said  by  another  acquaintance  of 
those  days  to  have  been  an  ambitious  young 
officer  who  enjoyed  the  adventure  of  foreign  serv- 
ice and  "could  not  understand  how  any  young 
fellow  in  the  army  could  settle  down  into  the 
humdrum  life  of  a  home  station." 

Just  as  he  went  to  Woolwich  a  rather  stupid 
boy,  but  sticking  to  his  books  managed  to  pass 
the  rather  difficult  examinations,  so,  arriving  in 
Palestine  as  an  amateur  photographer  in  search 

26 


KITCHENER  AT  TWENTY-EIGHT 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

of  adventure,  he  discovered  the  interest  of  ar- 
chaeology and  settled  down  to  make  himself  an 
efficient  student.  The  high  spirits  and  cheeriness 
which  M.  Ganneau  appreciated  as  a  contrast  to 
the  gravity  of  the  others  were  by  no  means  the 
main  characteristics  of  this  tall  young  English- 
man who  had  come  to  Palestine  neither  to  make 
merry  nor  to  meditate,  but  to  get  on. 

It  is  extremely  interesting,  we  think,  to  observe 
how  slowly,  how  quietly,  and  how  growingly  this 
central  passion  of  ambition  manifested  itself. 
He  came  to  Palestine  with  a  camera;  he  made 
some  excellent  maps;  he  became  interested  in  his 
work;  he  acquired  influence  and  power  over 
other  men;  and  he  became  in  time  commander 
of  the  expedition. 

A  few  extracts  from  the  young  officer's  re- 
ports are  worth  quoting,  though  one  may  read 
all  he  has  written  without  discovering  a  sentence 
of  real  self-revelation.  The  following  passage  is 
perhaps  his  nearest  approach  to  autobiogra- 
phy:— 

On  the  28th  I  received  a  telegram  to  the  effect 
that  war  had  been  declared  between  Turkey  and 
Russia.  I  hope  this  sad  news  will  not  interfere  with 
the  successful  completion  of  the  survey  of  Galilee. 

That'  is  how  "H.  H.  Kitchener,  Lieut.  R.E., 
Commanding  Palestine  Survey"  concludes  his 

27 


KITCHENER 

report  on  April  30,  1877,  to  the  Palestine  Ex- 
ploration Fund  Committee.  In  the  light  of  his 
subsequent  career,  it  is  the  most  piquant  pas- 
sage in  the  volume  of  the  "Quarterly  State- 
ments" in  which  it  is  to  be  found. 

This  volume  (1877-78)  is  the  only  one  which 
contains  many  of  Lieutenant  Kitchener's  re- 
ports, though  he  had  been  engaged  on  the  work 
with  Lieutenant  C.  R.  Conder,  who  achieved  so 
great  a  fame  in  Palestine  exploration,  since  1874. 
The  .first  is  dated  from  Haiffa  March  6,  1877, 
and  describes  among  other  interesting  incidents 
his  first  meeting  with  the  famous  Abd-el-Kader 
at  Damascus. 

The  reports  are  simple,  straightforward  bits 
of  writing,  succinct  and  to  the  point.  They  con- 
tain very  little  in  the  way  of  self-revelation. 
They  embody  some  excellent  descriptions  of 
historic  ruins  and  archaeological  discoveries,  and 
are,  of  course,  full  of  precise  and  valuable  in- 
formation on  the  physical  geography  of  the 
country.  A  feeling  for  scenery  reveals  itself  here 
and  there  in  allusions  to  the  beauty  of  valleys 
"now  carpeted  with  flowers  and  green  with  the 
growing  crops."  The  best  views  of  the  Sea  of 
Galilee,  he  tells  us,  are  from  the  distant  heights. 
"Thus  seen  in  the  evening  it  is  particularly 
lovely.  Deep  blue  shadows  seem  to  increase  the 

28 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

size  of  the  hills  and  there  is  always  a  rosy  flush 
in  the  sky  and  over  snow-clad  Hermon." 

In  July,  1877,  we  find  the  Committee,  at  their 
Annual  General  Meeting,  expressing  "their  high 
sense  of  Lieutenant  Kitchener's  ability  and 
zeal."  They  speak  of  his  reports  as  "careful  and 
intelligent"  and  note  with  much  satisfaction 
that  "his  monthly  accounts  show  a  due  regard  to 
economy"  —  a  premonition  of  one  aspect  of  his 
later  fame  in  Egypt  and  the  Sudan:  "He  has 
hitherto  managed  to  conduct  the  survey  for 
a  monthly  sum  less  than  that  which  the  Com- 
mittee gave  him  as  a  maximum."  In  due  course, 
in  a  letter  from  Jerusalem  dated  October  2, 1877, 
we  find  our  modest  young  explorer  declaring 
himself  "very  much  gratified"  by  these  com- 
mendations. 

While  engaged  in  repairing  Jacob's  Well  in 
Nablus  he  was  stoned  by  a  mob  of  boys  and  sub- 
jected to  various  indignities  at  the  hands  of  un- 
friendly officials,  but  apart  from  one  or  two  such 
incidents  he  seemed  to  have  met  with  no  unto- 
ward adventures.  His  final  contribution  to  the 
volume  is  a  reprint  of  a  paper  read  before  the 
Geographical  Section  of  the  British  Association, 
in  which  he  gives  a  connected  account  of  the 
Survey  and  announces  that  the  great  map  of 
Palestine  from  Dan  to  Beersheba  on  the  one- 

29 


KITCHENER 

inch  scale  (on  the  model  of  the  Ordnance  Survey 
of  England  and  Ireland)  has  been  completed  and 
is  in  the  hands  of  the  publishers.  Here  is  a  pas- 
sage which  illustrates  effectively  the  kind  of  un- 
looked-for obstacle  that  beset  the  surveyor's 
path:  — 

During  our  triangulation  we  found  some  little 
difficulty  from  the  natives,  who  thought  we  were 
magicians,  with  power  to  find  hidden  treasure  under 
the  ground  and  that  our  cairns  were  marks  to  re- 
member the  places  by.  It  was  an  unfortunate  idea, 
as  the  result  was  that  in  the  night-time  our  cairns 
often  disappeared  and  the  natives  groped  through 
any  earth  to  the  rock  below,  hoping  to  forestall  us. 
After  making  the  offenders  rebuild  the  cairns  on  one 
or  two  occasions,  these  annoyances  ceased. 

Dishonest  guides  were  another  trouble  and 
Lieutenant  Kitchener's  methods  with  them  are 
worth  noting. 

As  these  people  are  peculiarly  susceptible  of  sar- 
casm, the  offenders  were  not  happy  when  they  were 
laughed  out  of  camp  for  not  knowing  their  country 
as  well  as  we  knew  it. 

Another  incident  furnishes  the  young  soldier 
with  an  opportunity  for  descriptive  writing:  — 

One  evening  about  eighty  Bedouin  Arabs  with 
their  wives  and  families  arrived.  Their  chief's  son 
had  been  ill  and  they  had  taken  him  three  days' 
journey  to  the  tomb  of  the  famous  prophet  Joshua; 
this  was  supposed  to  have  cured  him  and  they  were 

30 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

now  returning  joyful  after  their  pilgrimage.  I  had 
a  goat  killed  in  their  honour  which  made  us  the  best 
friends,  and  they  kept  up  dancing  and  singing  round 
fires  in  front  of  our  tent  all  night.  The  men  went 
through  the  usual  war-dance,  imitating  the  attack 
and  defeat  of  an  enemy,  to  the  accompaniment  of 
clapping  hands;  but  what  was  more  curious  was 
later  in  the  evening,  when  two  of  the  prettiest  women 
were  called  by  their  husbands  and  went  through  a 
peculiar  and  very  graceful  dance  with  swords;  they 
were  unveiled  and  looked  quite  handsome  by  the 
firelight.  Having  rewarded  them  with  lumps  of 
sugar,  I  left  them  singing  songs  in  our  honour.  Next 
morning  they  were  all  gone,  having  left  pressing  in- 
vitations for  us  to  visit  them.  Two  days  later  the 
chief  came  to  thank  me  for  the  medicine  I  had  given 
his  boy. 

t  ?A  war  correspondent,  Mr.  John  Macdonald, 
who  was  in  Egypt  when  Kitchener  went  there 
in  1882  to  help  in  the  making  of  an  Egyptian 
Army,  has  described  the  first  encounter  of  the 
young  soldier  with  his  material.  Colonel  Taylor, 
of  the  Nineteenth  Hussars,  Kitchener's  com- 
manding officer,  was  present  on  this  interesting 
occasion:  — 

I  remember  Kitchener's  gaze  at  the  awkward, 
slipshod  group  as  he  took  his  position  in  the  centre  of 
a  circular  space  round  which  the  riders  were  to  show 
their  paces.  "We  begin  with  the  officers,"  said 
Taylor,  turning  to  me:  "We  shall  train  them  first, 
then  put  them  to  drill  the  troopers.  We  have  no 
troopers  just  yet,  though  we  have  440  horses  ready 

31 


KITCHENER 

for  them."  And  now  began  the  selection  of  the  fellah 
officers.  They  were  to  be  tested  in  horsemanship. 
The  first  batch  of  them  were  ordered  to  mount. 
Round  they  went,  Indian  file,  Kitchener,  like  a  circus 
master,  standing  in  the  centre.  Neither  audible  nor 
visible  sign  did  he  give  of  any  feeling  aroused  in  him 
by  a  performance  mostly  disappointing  and  some- 
times ridiculous.  His  hands  buried  in  his  trousers 
pockets,  he  quietly  watched  the  emergence  of  the 
least  unfit.  ...  In  half  an  hour  or  so  the  first  native 
officers  of  the  new  fellah  cavalry  were  chosen.  It  was 
then  that  Kitchener  made  his  longest  speech  — 
"We'll  have  to  drive  it  into  those  fellows,"  he  mut- 
tered, as  if  thinking  aloud. 

How  he  drove  it  into  those  fellows  all  the 
world  knows,  and  the  Egyptian  Army  certainly 
owes  to  Kitchener  a  considerable  debt  for  his 
devotion  to  its  efficiency.  He  did  not  himself  do 
very  much  of  the  "driving,"  but  he  selected  the 
very  best  officers  for  that  purpose  and  spared  no 
pains  in  keeping  them  up  to  the  mark. 

Another  war  correspondent,  Mr.  William  Max- 
well, has  referred  to  this  care  in  the  selection  of 
officers  and  to  Kitchener's  invincible  pertinac- 
ity: - 

His  industry,  patience,  and  perseverance  are  phe- 
nomenal, and  earned  for  him  on  the  banks  of  the 
Nile  —  as  I  often  heard  in  the  last  Sudan  campaign 
—  the  title  of  "  Master  of  the  Fatigue  Parties." 
Nothing  escaped  his  sleepless  eye  —  not  even  the 
ice-machine  which  the  Guards  tried  to  smuggle  on 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

the  way  to  Omdurman.  His  impatience  of  red-tape 
and  official  reports  was  shown  in  Egyptian  days  by 
the  fact  that  his  office  stationery  consisted  of  a  few 
telegraph  forms  which  he  carried  in  his  helmet. 

Not  less  characteristic  is  his  dislike  of  "influence" 
in  the  selection  of  his  officers.  To  every  kind  of 
cajolery  and  social  recommendation  he  presents  an 
adamantine  front,  and  his  success  has  been  due  in  a 
great  measure  to  his  wise  choice  of  instruments.  Yet 
no  general  has  ever  been  more  independent  of  help. 
Sir  Ian  Hamilton,  who  served  as  Lord  Kitchener's 
chief  of  staff  in  South  Africa,  declared  that  he  had 
nothing  to  do  but  smoke  his  pipe  and  write  his  brief 
official  despatches.  Even  Sir  Archibald  Hunter,  his 
sword-hand  in  the  Sudan,  confesses  that  he  never 
knew  his  chief's  plans  until  the  moment  came  for 
enforcing  them. 

.  .  .  "Sorry  to  report  the  loss  of  five  men  by  ex- 
plosion of  dynamite,"  is  said  to  have  been  the  anxious 
message  of  a  subaltern,  to  whom  relief  came  with  the 
reply:  "Do  you  want  any  more  dynamite?" 

.  .  .  When  his  native  standard-bearer,  envious  of 
the  battle-worn  standard  of  General  Hunter,  man- 
aged to  have  Lord  Kitchener's  standard  shot  through 
and  torn  to  rags,  the  ruthless  chief  smiled  grimly  and 
ordered  a  new  one.  I  remember  hearing  him  in  India, 
when  some  one  complained  of  the  malicious  and  false 
reports  of  the  habits  of  a  great  personage,  say  with- 
out a  quaver:  "What  does  it  matter?  Why,  they  say 
even  worse  things  about  me." 

It  was  after  many  heroic  but  baffled  attempts 
on  the  part  of  English  generals  to  reconquer  the 
Sudan  for  Egypt,  that  Kitchener  settled  down 


KITCHENER 

to  what  must  have  seemed  to  him  his  life's  work. 
He  determined  that  he  would  avenge  Gordon 
and  fly  the  British  Flag  at  Khartoum.  Instead, 
however,  of  picturesque  excursions  into  the  des- 
ert, he  set  himself  to  raise  an  immense  army  and 
to  carry  that  great  army  right  across  the  desert 
by  means  of  steam  power.  It  was  during  his 
preparations  for  this  great  task  that  he  became 
something  that  at  least  resembles  the  Kitchener 
legend.  "His  eyes,"  said  a  private  soldier,  "are 
like  the  bloomin*  Day  of  Judgment."  Never  a 
talkative  man,  he  became  taciturn  and  preoc- 
cupied. 

To  find  men  for  his  purpose,  men  who  would 
sacrifice  everything  to  the  business  in  hand, 
was  his  initial  difficulty,  and  to  get  rid  of  men 
who  were  either  incompetent  or  liable  to  human 
weakness  was  his  second  difficulty,  —  easier  than 
the  first,  but  not  so  easy  as  the  Kitchener  legend 
would  have  us  believe. 

Now  I  venture  to  say  that  this  taciturnity  and 
severity  of  Lord  Kitchener  were  in  the  first  in- 
stance the  result  of  anxiety  if  not  actual  mis- 
giving. Here  was  a  man,  not  a  soldier  in  the 
fighting  sense,  at  the  head  of  an  expedition  which 
was  to  penetrate  a  waterless  desert,  conquer 
hordes  of  fanatical  Dervishes  who  had  already 
beaten  army  after  army,  and  to  avenge  the 

34 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

murder  of  a  British  hero  whose  death  had  stirred 
the  whole  civilized  world.  From  the  year  1882, 
when  he  went  to  Egypt  as  second  in  command 
of  Egyptian  cavalry,  —  he  was  then  thirty-two 
years  of  age,  —  to  the  great  and  culminating  year 
of  1898  when  he  broke  the  Dervish  power  and 
restored  the  Sudan  to  Egypt,  what  anxiety,  what 
fears,  what  misgivings  must  have  visited  his 
brain.  The  story  is  told  that  after  the  victory 
of  Atbara,  George  Steevens  visited  the  head- 
quarters of  the  army  and  congratulated  Kitch- 
ener on  his  success.  "Thank  you,"  said  Kitch- 
ener, shaking  his  hand;  and  then,  the  smile 
leaving  his  face,  he  exclaimed,  "My  God,  if  I 
had  failed!" 

We  can  understand,  then,  the  hardening  of  the 
man,  and  make  allowance  for  his  severity  with 
incompetent  officers.  We  can  understand,  too, 
that  he  would  gradually  acquire  a  terrible  man- 
ner, and  that  the  constant  problems  presenting 
themselves  to  his  laborious  mind  would  oust  the 
gentler  motions  of  the  human  spirit.  The  effect 
of  his  presence  has  been  well  described  by  an 
officer  in  Egypt  as  one  of  "extreme  discomfort." 
He  described  the  unexpected  emergence  of  "the 
great  man"  from  his  tent,  and  the  feeling  that 
instantly  communicated  itself  to  those  in  the 
vicinity :  — 

35 


KITCHENER 

I  flinched,  although  I  was  doing  nothing  wrong; 
the  subaltern  stopped  talking  to  me  as  though  caught 
in  a  theft;  a  soldier  who  was  driving  in  tent-pegs 
dropped  his  tools  and  began  to  fumble  at  his  buttons; 
upon  all  sides  there  was  an  instant  of  extreme  dis- 
comfort until  the  great  man  went  in  again. 

A  lady  of  quality  visited  Cairo  after  this  cam- 
paign and  asked  that  Kitchener  should  be  pre- 
sented to  her.  "Do  you  like  Cairo?"  he  asked 
her,  after  an  awkward  pause,  and  when  the  lady 
had  talked  for  a  considerable  time  of  her  im- 
pressions and  adventures,  he  said,  "I  am  glad 
of  that,"  and  retired  with  a  bow.  The  lady,  re- 
porting this  encounter,  ended  up  with  the  judg- 
ment, "I  never  met  so  stupid  a  man." 

In  October,  1910,  Lord  Kitchener  spoke  of  the 
difficulties  which  confronted  him  after  his  con- 
quest in  the  Sudan. 

He  well  remembered  the  difficulty  of  the  problem 
how  best  to  evolve,  out  of  the  ruins  left  by  the  Der- 
vishes, a  practical  reconstruction  of  Khartoum  on 
sanitary  lines.  First  careful  consideration  had  to  be 
given  to  the  susceptibilities  of  a  naturally  uneducated 
foreign  population,  to  whose  conservative  minds 
most  modern  regulations  were  repugnant.  No  trou- 
ble of  that  kind  had,  however,  arisen,  and  the  na- 
tives had  agreed  to  the  propositions,  and  there  was 
no  doubt  that  the  reasonable  regulations  enforced 
meant  increased  length  of  life  and  increased  pros- 
perity. Those  who  knew  Khartoum  in  the  old  days 
would  recognize  that  a  revolution  had  been  effected. 

36 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

The  old  Khartoum  was  an  African  pest-house  in 
which  every  tropical  disease  thrived  and  ran  rampant. 
Last  year  there  were  only  eleven  cases  of  malaria  in 
a  population  of  50,000.  He  did  not  think  such  re- 
sults had  been  achieved  in  any  other  British  depend- 
ency, and  they  were  a  proof  of  the  thorough  efficiency 
of  the  country. 

...  In  1899,  the  year  after  the  culmination  of  the 
Nile  campaign,  the  revenue  for  the  whole  of  the 
Sudan  was  estimated  at  only  £8000,  which  showed 
a  state  of  destitution  for  a  country  nearly  as  large 
as  Europe.  When  this  was  compared  with  the  pres- 
ent revenue  of  over  £1,000,000,  the  progress  made 
was  apparent.  Municipal  steam  tramways  were 
running  in  Khartoum  from  the  central  to  outside 
districts.  It  was  anticipated  that  the  city  would 
ultimately  extend  to  the  west  and  to  the  south,  and, 
as  this  was  Government  land,  it  seemed  assured  that 
the  extensions  would  be  made  in  accordance  with 
the  existing  system  of  planning.  A  suburb  might 
also  be  built  at  Burri  to  the  east  of  the  waterworks. 

In  the  following  year,  1911,  when  he  was 
asking  the  public  for  money,  the  "Daily  Chron- 
icle" published  the  folio  wing  characteristic  anec- 
dote:— 

Lord  Kitchener's  present  appeal  for  £4000  to  com- 
plete the  Anglican  Cathedral  at  Khartoum,  on  which 
£24,000  has  already  been  spent,  recalls  a  story  told 
of  him  by  Mr.  G.  W.  Smalley  in  connection  with 
"K.  of  K.'s"  similar  appeal  for  £100,000  to  build  a 
Gordon  Memorial  College.  But  it  was  some  little 
time  before  he  could  decide  to  issue  an  appeal  for 
such  a  large  sum,  seeing  that,  as  he  said,  "I  should 

37 


KITCHENER 

not  like  to  fail,  and,  if  they  gave  me  only  part  of  the 
amount,  to  have  to  return  it."  Large  sums  were 
offered  there  and  then,  —  at  Mr.  Ralli's  dining- 
table,  —  but  still  he  hesitated.  At  last  one  of  the 
company  said,  "Well,  Lord  Kitchener,  if  you  had 
doubted  about  your  campaign  as  you  do  now  about 
this,  you  would  never  have  got  to  Khartoum."  His 
face  hardened,  and  he  replied:  "Perhaps  not;  but 
then  I  could  depend  on  myself,  and  now  I  have  to 
depend  on  the  British  Public." 

His  real  work  in  South  Africa  only  began  after 
Lord  Roberts  had  taken  the  Boer  capital  of  Pre- 
toria. To  catch  the  slippery  De  Wet  and  to 
stamp  out  the  last  smouldering  embers  of  rebel- 
lion was  the  rather  dull,  exasperating,  and  yet 
most  essential  work  which  fell  to  his  charge.  He 
is  said  to  have  been  annoyed  by  the  too  humane 
tactics  of  Lord  Roberts,  and  according  to  some 
people  he  would  have  ended  the  war  very  much 
sooner  if  he  had  been  in  supreme  command.  We 
only  know  that  he  did  the  work  entrusted  to  him 
with  a  slow  and  rather  lumpish  thoroughness, 
"wiping  up  De  Wet,"  making  the  way  of  rebels 
extremely  hard,  and  establishing  the  army  in 
South  Africa  in  a  manner  which  made  further 
rebellion  a  thing  not  likely  to  tempt  wise  and 
reflective  men.  It  seems  to  me  that  a  kind  of 
contempt  characterized  Kitchener's  work  in 
South  Africa,  and  that  he  was  glad  to  get  out  of 

38 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

a  country  which  had  for  him  neither  the  glory 
of  the  East  nor  the  comfort  of  home. 

It  is  said  that  a  "Boer  Delilah"  who  tried  to 
captivate  Kitchener  reported  of  him  after  her 
experiment:  "This  is  the  most  dangerous  man  in 
Britain.  I  feel  as  if  I  were  within  the  shadow  of 
death  when  I  am  near  him.  He  is  a  man  for  men 
to  conquer.  No  woman  can  reach  him  to  use  him. 
He  would  read  me  like  an  open  book  in  an  hour, 
and  I  believe  he  would  shoot  me  as  he  would 
shoot  a  Kaffir  if  he  caught  me  red-handed.  I  will 
try  all  other  men,  but  not  that  living  death's- 
head.  No  wonder  he  conquered  in  Egypt.  I 
think  he  would  conquer  in  Hades."  No  doubt 
the  temperament  of  the  lady,  which  accounts  for 
this  lurid  language,  also  accounts  for  the  effect 
which  she  supposed  Kitchener  to  have  made 
upon  her.  Her  subjective  Kitchener  —  if  she 
ever  saw  him  —  was  not  the  objective  Kitchener, 
however  alarming  that  gentleman  may  be.  But 
the  story  is  interesting  as  a  manifestation  of  the 
growth  of  the  Kitchener  legend.  It  was  in  South 
Africa  that  he  refused  to  hold  a  conversation  with 
a  highly  explosive  general  over  the  telephone. 
"He  would  fuse  the  wires,"  said  Kitchener. 

Of  his  work  in  India  there  is  little  to  be  said 
and  few  stories  to  be  told.  I  asked  a  very  ener- 
getic and  enthusiastic  British  officer  in  the  In- 

39 


KITCHENER 

dian  Army  to  tell  me  what  Kitchener  had  done 
for  the  army  in  India,  and  he  replied  as  follows: — 

His  presence  in  India  was  enough.  A  feeling  per- 
vaded the  whole  army.  We  never  knew  when  h*j 
might  descend  upon  us.  It  was  as  if  we  were  invaded 
by  an  enemy.  Every  man  worked  harder  simply  in 
case  Kitchener  might  suddenly  appear  in  that  par- 
ticular district.  And  I  will  tell  you  how  he  handled 
the  situation.  He  gave  an  order  quite  careless  of 
whether  it  could  be  carried  out,  and  when  objection 
was  raised,  however  reasonable,  he  merely  repeated 
his  order.  In  this  way  I  have  known  things  to  be 
done  never  before  attempted  in  those  localities.  Men 
set  themselves  to  perform  the  impossible  and  made 
it  a  fact.  In  this  way  throughout  the  whole  of  India 
there  was  a  new  spirit,  a  fresh  efficiency.  Some  of 
Kitchener's  reforms,  such  as  examination  tests  for 
promotion,  seemed  to  me  excellent;  but  it  was  not 
by  any  of  these  reforms  that  he  most  benefited  the 
army.  It  was  simply  by  his  presence,  the  knowledge 
of  his  severity,  and  the  faith  in  his  justice  which  most 
men  entertained. 

One  story  I  was  told  which  is  worth  repeating. 
Kitchener  suddenly  came  to  inspect  a  regiment 
of  Rajputs.  The  young  officer  commanding  this 
regiment  was  delighted  by  the  commander-in- 
chief's  evident  satisfaction.  To  the  general  who 
accompanied  him,  Kitchener  said:  "It's  a  pleas- 
ure to  inspect  a  regiment  the  faces  of  which  are 
on  a  level  with  one's  own,  after  looking  down  for 
weeks  on  the  tops  of  British  helmets."  When 

40 


LORD  KITCHENER  WITH  HIS  STAFF,  IN  INDIA 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

they  came  to  inspect  the  new  barracks,  Kitch- 
ener asked  the  commanding  officer  whether  he 
had  any  complaints  to  make.  "Yes,  sir,"  re- 
turned the  young  colonel;  "the  windows  are  too 
many  and  too  big;  they'll  let  in  far  too  much 
heat  in  the  hot  season;  I've  complained  about 
the  matter,  but  without  any  effect;  you  know 
what  Engineer  officers  are  like,  sir;  it's  quite 
imposs — "  He  stopped  abruptly,  Kitchener's 
eye  upon  him,  and  remembered  when  it  was  too 
late  what  should  have  been  present  in  his  mind 
from  the  first.  "Well,  Colonel  Dash,"  said 
Kitchener,  "in  me  and  in  General  Blank  you 
behold  two  Engineer  officers  who  are  open  to 
reason."  And  he  saved  an  awkward  situation 
by  a  not  unkindly  smile. 

Of  his  famous  dispute  with  Lord  Curzon,  wid- 
ening into  a  personal  quarrel,  nothing  more  need 
be  said  than  this,  that,  while  Kitchener  stoutly 
denied  a  wish  to  set  the  military  power  above  the 
civil,  most  people  are  disposed  to  think  that  he 
did  not  fight  his  battle  in  a  manner  to  convert  his 
critics.  Kitchener  declares  that  he  only  wanted 
to  be  rid  of  "that  worst  of  military  faults  —  a 
division  of  authority,"  and  said  that  he  wished 
to  make  the  Indian  Army  an  efficient  whole  in- 
stead of  "an  accidental  planless  thing,  having 
no  relation  to  any  possible  or  imaginable  emer- 

41 


KITCHENER 

gency."  But  his  obstinacy  and  his  method  of  at- 
taining these  ends  resulted  in  the  resignation  of 
Lord  Curzon;  and  very  soon  after  Kitchener  left 
India  his  successor,  Sir  O'Moore  Creagh  —  nick- 
named "No  More  K"  —  did  away  with  many 
of  the  innovations  which  Lord  Kitchener  had 
taken  such  elaborate  pains  to  introduce. 

Before  he  returned  to  England  in  1910,  after 
travelling  some  seventy  thousand  miles  during 
his  command  in  India,  he  visited  China,  Japan, 
America,  New  Zealand,  and  Australia.  He  aston- 
ished the  Japanese  by  his  silence,  and  delighted 
the  Australians  by  his  praise  of  their  troops.  On 
his  return  to  England  he  became  the  centre  of  a 
political  dispute.  Unionists  wanted  to  see  him 
at  the  War  Office;  a  Liberal  Government,  satis- 
fied with  the  very  excellent  work  being  done 
at  the  War  Office,  offered  him  the  post  of  High 
Commissioner  of  the  Mediterranean.  Kitchener 
accepted  this  appointment,  but  resigned  it  before 
taking  office.  Tory  and  Radical  barked  at  each 
other  over  this  incident  for  a  number  of  rather 
tiresome  weeks. 

In  1911  Kitchener  was  made  British  Agent  in 
Egypt.  His  work  there  has  been  to  carry  on  the 
Cromer  tradition,  but  he  has  instituted  several 
reforms  which  have  contributed  very  materially 
to  the  prosperity  of  the  Sudan.  He  has  shown 

42 


STORIES  OF  THE  CAREER 

little  sympathy  to  the  Nationalists  of  Egypt,  rul- 
ing by  the  power  of  the  Big  Stick,  and  he  is  in 
consequence  more  unpopular  with  Egyptian  poli- 
ticians than  any  of  his  predecessors.  It  is  a  pity 
that  lack  of  imagination  has  marred  his  other- 
wise most  remarkable  contribution  to  the  pros- 
perity of  modern  Egypt. 

He  was  in  England  at  the  time  when  Germany 
was  beginning  her  fateful  challenge  of  the  world. 
Immediately  the  Unionists  clamoured  that  he 
should  be  appointed  to  the  War  Office,  then  in 
charge  of  the  Prime  Minister,  but  the  Liberals 
made  no  move  in  this  direction.  The  clamour 
grew  louder  the  more  the  menace  of  Germany 
came  home  to  men's  minds.  And  at  last  the 
Government  yielded.  Why  they  yielded  we 
shall  say  in  the  next  chapter.  Lord  Kitchener, 
who  was  staying  with  his  cousin,  Mr.  Mullins, 
Squire  of  Ringwood,  near  Kingsdown,  was  ac- 
tually motoring  to  catch  the  steamer  at  Dover 
when  the  message  came  which  called  him  to  the 
War  Office. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  KITCHENER  LEGEND 

IT  was  by  the  work  of  a  very  brilliant  news- 
paper correspondent,  the  late  G.  W.  Steevens, 
that  the  name  of  Kitchener  became  suddenly 
familiar  to  British  democracy,  and  it  was  by  the 
work  of  the  same  writer  that  the  Kitchener  legend 
took  possession  of  the  public  mind. 

In  a  series  of  very  dramatic  and  sometimes 
brilliant  articles,  which  appeared  in  a  popular 
London  newspaper,  George  Steevens  described 
the  famous  march  to  Khartoum,  filling  the  grey 
commercial  atmosphere  of  London  with  the  rich 
colours  of  the  East,  with  the  exciting  adventure 
of  war,  and  with  the  still  more  exciting  sensation 
of  anxiety.  And,  like  a  wise  story-teller,  Steevens 
gave  his  readers  a  hero  in  this  brave  tale  of  ad- 
venture. In  one  brief  article  he  thrust  Kitchener 
before  the  roused  attention  of  the  British  public 
and  made  not  only  the  title  of  "The  Sirdar" 
but  the  personality  of  this  particular  Sirdar  a 
permanent  possession  of  the  British  mind. 

Here  was  the  picture  of  the  outward  man:  — 

He  stands  several  inches  over  six  feet,  straight  as 
a  lance,  and  looks  out  imperiously  above  most  men's 

44 


THE  KITCHENER  LEGEND 

heads;  his  motions  are  deliberate  and  strong:  slender 
but  firmly  knit,  he  seems  built  for  tireless,  steel-wire 
endurance  rather  than  for  power  or  agility.  .  .  . 
Steady  passionless  eyes  shaded  by  decisive  brows, 
brick-red  rather  full  cheeks,  a  long  mustache  be- 
neath which  you  divine  an  immovable  mouth;  his 
face  is  harsh,  and  neither  appeals  for  affection  nor 
stirs  dislike. 

From  this  we  pass  to  the  essential  fact,  the  man 
himself,  the  spirit  of  Kitchener.  "He  has  no 
age,"  we  read,  "but  the  prime  of  life,  no  body 
but  one  to  carry  his  mind,  no  face  but  one  to 
keep  his  brain  behind."  His  precision  "is  so  in- 
humanly unerring,  he  is  more  like  a  machine 
than  a  man."  He  is  "The  Man  Who  Has  Made 
Himself  a  Machine."  And  the  writer  concludes 
that  Kitchener  "ought  to  be  patented  and  shown 
with  pride  at  the  Paris  International  Exhibition. 
British  Engine:  Exhibit  No.  1,  hors  concours,  the 
Sudan  Machine."  l 

Thus  the  legend  of  Kitchener  was  created. 
You  can  imagine  the  delight  of  the  Londoner  as 
he  opened  his  newspaper  every  morning  to  fol- 
low the  great  march  across  the  desert  with  so  new, 
so  unexpected,  and  so  unlike-himself  a  hero  as 
this  Man  Who  Had  Made  Himself  a  Machine. 
The  average  Briton  is  a  creature  of  domestic  hab- 

1  With  Kitchener  to  Khartoum.  By  G.  W.  Steevens  (William 
Blackwood  &  Sons). 

45 


KITCHENER 

its,  fond  of  his  fireside,  easiest  in  carpet  slippers 
and  an  old  coat,  calling  the  wife  of  his  bosom 
"Mother,"  and  regarding  his  olive  branches  with 
open  pride  and  indulgent  affection.  To  such  a 
man,  then,  Kitchener  suddenly  appeared  as  a 
heaven-sent  distraction.  He  found  himself  con- 
templating a  hero  who  contradicted  all  his  Brit- 
ish notions  and  yet  in  some  strange  fashion 
braced  the  softening  fibres  of  his  soul.  And  as 
the  mighty  army  moved  across  the  desert,  the 
Briton  in  his  armchair  smiled  easily,  wagged  his 
head  knowingly,  and  said:  "That  young  Kitch- 
ener will  make  no  mistake.  The  Sirdar  will  crush 
the  Dervish  once  and  for  all." 

But  this  new  hero  of  England  was  the  very 
antithesis  of  the  Englishman.  He  was  said  to 
hate  women.  He  was  said  to  be  merciless  and 
without  pity.  He  would  allow  no  officer  on  his 
staff  to  get  married.  He  broke  every  man  who 
failed  to  carry  out  his  orders.  He  was  tyrant, 
despot,  brute.  He  was  everything  the  average 
Englishman  dislikes.  .  .  . 

Perhaps  it  was  this  very  antithesis  which  at- 
tracted the  popular  imagination.  England  was 
beginning  to  be  made  aware  that  she  had  many 
enemies  in  the  world  and  scarcely  a  friend.  One  of 
her  statesmen  was  to  coin  the  phrase  of  "glori- 
ous isolation."  The  sudden  rise  of  a  new  Caesar, 

46 


THE  KITCHENER  LEGEND 

a  new  Napoleon,  gave  a  sense  of  security  to  the 
domesticated  Englishman.  War  with  France 
might  come  at  any  moment;  Russia  had  her  eye 
on  India;  the  Balkans  would  presently  burst  into 
flames;  Germany  would  take  advantage  of  the 
death  of  the  Emperor  of  Austria;  —  well,  what 
matter?  Kitchener  would  be  there  to  see  that  no 
harm  came  to  us. 

One  admires  in  another  the  quality  he  most 
lacks  in  himself,  and  admiration  multiplies  and 
intensifies  that  quality  until  it  becomes  greater 
than  it  is.  In  this  fashion  the  domesticated  Eng- 
lishman created  the  Kitchener  Goliath  —  the 
inhuman,  heartless,  but  unerring  giant  —  The 
Man  Who  Had  Made  Himself  a  Machine. 

Everything  in  Kitchener's  career  has  tended 
to  confirm  the  whole  world  in  this  first  delusion. 
He  not  only  pulverized  the  Dervishes,  but 
smashed  the  Mahdi's  tomb.  He  came  home  only 
to  snub  lion-hunters  and  to  hasten  back  to  duty. 
He  went  to  South  Africa  and  prevented  Lord 
Roberts  from  being  too  tender  with  the  Boers. 
He  took  over  the  army  in  India  and  not  only 
rendered  it  amazingly  efficient,  but  humbled  the 
most  powerful  Viceroy  of  modern  times.  He 
returned  to  Egypt  and  brought  rebellion  to  a 
better  mind.  He  installed  himself  at  the  War 
Office  and  immediately  broke  the  back  of  the 

47 


KITCHENER 

German's  advance  on  Paris.  And  now  the  mil- 
lion men  drilling  in  Great  Britain  are  "Kitch- 
ener's Army,"  and  with  that  army  Kitchener 
will  utterly  destroy  Prussian  militarism. 

So  the  world  reads  the  story  of  this  man, 
starting  from  the  first  wrong  premiss  of  G.  W. 
Steevens,  and  thinking  of  him  not  as  a  fallible 
human  creature,  but  as  a  machine  that  cannot 
err. 

Now,  the  really  fundamental  and  essential 
characteristic  of  Lord  Kitchener  is  not  "unerr- 
ing precision,"  but  tenacity,  and  this  tenacity 
is  little  more  than  the  obstinacy  of  a  very  slow 
and  laborious  mind.  All  the  qualities  which  go 
to  the  making  of  a  brilliant  intelligence  are  en- 
tirely lacking  in  him,  so  entirely  lacking  that  he 
is  said  by  those  who  have  studied  him  closely 
to  be  unconscious  of  his  own  dullness.  He  is 
the  bulldog,  and  given  plenty  of  time  he  is  un- 
beatable; but  the  intuitions  of  genius  never  visit 
his  brain;  he  never  sees  truth  in  a  flash  of 
inspiration,  and  unexpected  interruption  of  his 
plans  comes  to  him  as  crisis  or  disaster.  Further, 
he  is  by  no  means  bloodless.  It  is  quite  a  mis- 
take, as  we  shall  show  presently,  to  regard  him 
as  a  woman-hater.  He  has  tastes  and  occupa- 
tions entirely  outside  the  narrow  circumference 
of  war.  He  is  so  little  like  a  machine  that  he  can 

48 


THE  KITCHENER  LEGEND 

enter  into  the  trivial  fun  of  a  house-party.   And 
he  makes  mistakes. 

But  we  may  say  that  on  the  whole  Kitchener's 
career,  as  the  public  knows  it,  has  justified  the 
delusion  which  began  in  the  Sudan.  He  has  al- 
ways succeeded.  And  he  has  never  sought  popu- 
larity. Always  something  of  a  mystery,  he  has 
gone  about  his  business  in  silence  and  never  once 
has  he  publicly  betrayed  his  humanity  or  given 
the  nation  reason  to  question  the  Kitchener 
legend.  What  would  have  happened  if  he  had 
married,  I  do  not  know;  and  how  the  public 
would  have  borne  the  news  that  he  had  become  a 
father  I  do  not  dare  to  speculate.  As  it  is,  the  real 
Kitchener  has  not  "given  away"  the  false  Kitch- 
ener, even  in  domesticity,  and  so  convinced  is 
the  public  of  the  false  Kitchener  being  the  real 
Kitchener,  that  I  feel  there  is  no  danger  in  the 
world  in  telling  the  truth.  I  shall  convert  no  one. 


CHAPTER  VII 

AT   THE  WAR   OFFICE 

WHY  did  the  Government  yield  to  popular 
clamour  and  appoint  Lord  Kitchener  to  the  War 
Office? 

For  myself  I  regard  this  surrender  as  almost 
the  most  decisive  proof  of  the  imaginative  power 
of  the  Prime  Minister.  It  was  necessary  to  pre- 
sent a  unanimous  front  to  the  enemy;  it  was 
necessary  to  give  the  public  a  sense  of  security. 
By  placing  Lord  Kitchener  at  the  War  Office, 
Mr.  Asquith  satisfied  the  entire  British  nation, 
and  with  this  satisfaction  a  wave  of  enthusiasm 
for  the  war  rose  in  every  part  of  the  country,  and 
swept  the  whole  nation  forward  in  a  settled  de- 
termination to  see  the  business  through. 

But  Mr.  Asquith  knew,  every  member  of  the 
Cabinet  knew,  that  under  the  administration  of 
Lord  Haldane  preparations  had  been  made  for 
the  crisis  which  now  visited  the  empire.  All  the 
marvellous  organization  which  carried  our  gal- 
lant army  to  France,  without  the  loss  of  a  man 
or  a  bundle  of  hay,  had  been  planned  years  be- 
fore by  the  Staff  College  under  the  administra- 

50 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

tion  of  Lord  Haldane.  Every  perfection  of  that 
immense  machinery  was  an  established  fact. 
The  men  were  there,  the  commissariat  was  there, 
the  medical  service  was  there,  the  transports  were 
there,  and  the  railways  were  thoroughly  pre- 
pared for  their  task.  Without  hitch  of  any  kind 
the  most  highly  organized  army  in  the  world  left 
these  shores,  passed  to  the  fighting-line,  and  never 
once  has  lacked  for  food  or  blanket.  All  this  had 
been  thought  out,  planned  for,  and  prepared  in 
every  minutest  detail  by  Lord  Haldane. 

One  thing,  however,  was  lacking. 

In  the  supreme  moments  of  a  nation's  history? 
the  personality  of  a  man  who  has  the  confidence 
of  the  people  is  a  possession  of  almost  incalcu- 
lable value.  Mr.  Asquith,  who  had  been  the 
object  of  a  pitiless  partisan  attack  for  some  years, 
and  Lord  Haldane,  who  was  actually  accused 
of  pro-German  sympathies,  could  not,  in  spite  of 
their  obvious  merits,  arouse  the  enthusiasm  of 
the  entire  nation.  One  man  alone  was  able  to  do 
that,  and  this  man  was  a  Tory  of  Tories,  whose 
views  about  Liberalism,  of  course,  were  very  well 
known  to  the  Government.  Nevertheless,  Mr. 
Asquith  decided  that  Lord  Kitchener  should  be 
called  to  the  War  Office.  By  that  decision  he 
relieved  the  tension  of  a  very  critical  situation, 
and  made  it  plain  to  all  who  could  understand 

51 


KITCHENER 

that  he  was  a  statesman  of  imagination.  Was 
there  ever  a  more  telling  and  more  ironical 
stroke?  The  wonderful  legend  of  Kitchener,  in 
a  moment  of  the  gravest  danger,  acted  upon  a 
practical  nation  and  a  great  empire  with  a  force 
not  to  be  equalled  by  the  reality  of  a  greater 
man. 

In  this  sense  it  may  truthfully  be  said  of  Lord 
Kitchener  that  "he  came  at  the  right  hour,  and 
he  was  the  right  man."  In  the  opinion  of  a  sin- 
gularly able  politician,  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  with 
his  swiftness  of  thought,  his  impatience  of  red- 
tape,  and  his  willingness  to  delegate  authority, 
guided  by  young  military  opinion,  would  have 
made  an  incomparably  better  Secretary  for  War 
than  the  real  Lord  Kitchener.  But  this  same  ob- 
server sees  very  clearly  that  the  better  adminis- 
tration of  Mr.  Lloyd  George  would  nothing  like 
so  splendidly  advantage  the  nation  as  the  per- 
sonality of  Lord  Kitchener.  It  was  the  person- 
ality of  Lord  Kitchener,  the  great  Kitchener 
legend,  which  gave  to  the  awakened  and  rather 
startled  people  of  Great  Britain,  at  the  outset  of 
Germany's  challenge,  that  sense  of  confidence 
and  security  which  has  since  characterized  the 
nation's  attitude  through  every  hour  of  the  con- 
flict, even  the  darkest  and  most  bitter;  and  it  is 
this  same  personality,  this  same  legend,  which  is 

52 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

still  inspiring  the  optimism  of  a  nation  absolutely 
convinced  of  victory. 

If  we  leave  out  of  count  this  psychological 
value,  it  might  almost  be  argued  that  scarcely 
any  soldier  of  importance  could  be  less  fitted  in  a 
moment  of  crisis  for  the  post  of  War  Secretary 
than  the  great  Lord  Kitchener.  For  Lord  Kitch- 
ener is  a  man  who  does  not  easily  get  into  a  new 
saddle;  he  takes  time  to  look  about  him  before  he 
is  sure  of  his  surroundings;  and  he  moves  slowly 
until  he  is  perfectly  acquainted  with  the  road 
ahead  of  him.  Moreover,  he  has  spent  by  far  the 
greater  part  of  his  life  in  the  East,  and  is  not  only 
ignorant  of  European  conditions,  but  frankly  out 
of  sympathy  with  modern  democracies.  Few 
men  living,  I  imagine,  are  more  completely  out  of 
touch  with  the  England  of  the  present  time  than 
this  heavy  and  ponderous  man  who  at  a  single 
stroke  became  the  national  hero.  Further,  he  is 
no  longer  Steevens's  Sirdar,  "  slender  but  firmly 
knit  .  .  .  built  for  tireless  steel-wire  endurance." 
He  is  sixty-four  years  of  age,  bulky  and  heavy- 
shouldered,  with  a  fatherly  and  benignant  aspect, 
wearing  spectacles,  his  hair  turning  grey,  his 
large  red  face  expressing  something  more  than  a 
shield  for  his  brain.  In  fact  Lord  Kitchener  bears 
at  the  present  day  no  resemblance  at  all  to  the 
legendary  Kitchener. 

53 


KITCHENER 

But  if  any  man  in  England  were  to  suggest 
that  General  Baden-Powell  should  go  to  the  War 
Office  he  would  very  certainly  be  laughed  to 
scorn,  and  if  any  man  were  to  call  for  Lord 
Kitchener's  resignation  he  would  assuredly  be 
denounced  as  a  German  spy.  And  yet,  if  it  had 
not  been  for  Lord  Haldane's  work  at  the  War 
Office,  those  very  champions  of  Lord  Kitchener 
who  are  now  most  loud  and  ridiculous  in  his 
praise  might  be  choosing  the  lamp-post  on  which 
to  hang  him.  For  Lord  Kitchener,  I  think,  could 
not  possibly  have  reorganized  the  War  Office  and 
got  the  army  safely  over  to  France,  in  the  time  at 
his  disposal,  without  chaos  and  disaster. 

Providentially  for  us,  providentially  as  history 
may  say  for  the  whole  world,  Kitchener  came  to 
a  War  Office  thoroughly  reformed  and  perfectly 
equipped  for  its  tremendous  responsibilities. 
And,  providentially  again,  the  work  that  fell  to 
his  hands  was  just  that  very  work  at  which  he 
excels,  the  work  of  making  new  armies.  Instead 
of  finding  excitement  and  disorder  he  entered 
a  War  Office  that  was  working  with  so  smooth 
a  precision  that  one  might  have  thought  no 
crisis  had  arisen.  Into  this  calm  atmosphere, 
conducted  by  a  smiling  and  agreeable  Prime 
Minister,  Lord  Kitchener  came  only  to  inherit 
routine  which  could  not  be  improved  upon.  But 

54 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

something  was  waiting  for  him  to  bring  into 
existence,  something  foreseen  and  partially  pre- 
pared for  by  other  men,  but  something  to  which 
the  magic  of  his  fame  could  bring  an  almost  ir- 
resistible wizardry.  As  I  have  already  stated, 
his  first  call  for  500,000  men,  while  it  took  away 
the  nation's  breath  for  a  moment,  steadied  the 
national  mind  and  prepared  it  for  a  long  and 
laborious  war.  Then  when  we  learned  that  this 
new  army,  and  even  the  splendid  troops  from 
the  Dominions,  were  to  be  well  drilled  before 
being  sent  to  the  front,  we  realized  that  however 
great  the  crisis  there  was  no  immediate  danger, 
and  felt  that  Kitchener  would  see  us  safely 
through  all  dangers. 

Is  it  possible  to  exaggerate  this  psychological 
value?  Those  who  remember  the  early  days  of 
the  war  will  testify  that  the  announcement  of 
Kitchener's  appointment  to  the  War  Office  was 
like  a  victory  after  days  of  most  dread  and  terri- 
ble anxiety.  And  at  the  present  moment  are  we 
not  all  living  in  the  faith  that  Kitchener  —  the 
terrible,  silent,  ferocious,  and  merciless  Kitchener 
—  will  hold  on  to  the  end  and  will  never  loose  his 
hold  until  the  enemy  is  beaten? 

So  completely  has  the  Kitchener  legend  taken 
possession  of  the  national  mind  that  it  is  per- 
fectly safe  to  discuss  the  matter,  even  as  I  am 

55 


KITCHENER 

discussing  it  now,  with  no  fear  in  the  world  that 
England  will  waver  in  her  confidence.  And  one 
need  not  be  concerned  with  German  interest  in 
our  discussion,  since  the  work  to  which  Kitchener 
has  now  set  his  hand,  the  work  most  fatal  to 
German  ambition,  is  just  the  work  which  Kitch- 
ener does  excellently  well.  The  first  critical 
months  are  over  —  the  months  when  swiftness 
of  decision  and  brilliance  of  initiative  might 
have  hastened  the  end;  and  we  can  now  look 
round  about  us,  talk  with  a  degree  of  freedom 
impossible  during  those  first  months,  and  gossip 
more  or  less  to  our  heart's  content.  Moreover, 
it  should  rather  increase  than  lessen  the  con- 
fidence of  Great  Britain  to  learn  that  she  owes 
her  great  achievement  in  Europe  not  to  one 
elderly  man,  but  to  a  body  of  young  and  brilliant 
staff  officers,  who  under  Lord  Haldane's  wise  and 
stimulating  headship  set  the  British  War  Office 
in  such  amazing  good  order. 

It  must  not  be  imagined,  however,  because 
one  no  longer  believes  in  the  Kitchener  legend, 
that  the  real  Lord  Kitchener  is  only  a  figurehead 
to  the  ship  of  state  in  its  hour  of  dirty  weather. 
He  is  an  entirely  different  person  from  the  le- 
gendary Kitchener,  and  at  the  present  day  he  is 
no  longer  the  real  Kitchener  who  laid  a  railway 
across  the  desert  and  broke  the  savage  power  of 

56 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

the  Dervishes.  But  he  is  still  an  obstinate,  slow- 
thinking,  and  tenacious  organizer,  still  a  man 
who  knows  the  right  person  for  a  particular 
undertaking,  still  a  man  who  yields  to  no  social 
pressure  in  the  sphere  of  patronage,  and  still  a 
man  who  is  an  absolute  terror  to  the  grafter  and 
the  fool.  He  has  set  himself  to  raise  immense 
armies  in  England,  and  he  is  determined  that 
nothing  shall  make  him  despatch  these  new 
troops  to  the  front  until  they  have  acquired 
something  of  the  discipline  and  smartness  which 
are  such  distinguishing  marks  of  the  regular 
British  Army.  A  weaker  man,  or  let  us  say,  a 
man  less  obstinate,  might  have  been  tempted  to 
send  these  green  armies  to  France  and  to  Bel- 
gium in  the  first  nerve-trying  months  of  the  war. 
Kitchener  was  like  a  rock  in  this  matter.  And 
he  was  like  a  rock,  and  remains  like  a  rock,  in 
another  matter,  the  matter  of  war  correspond- 
ents. The  Cabinet  at  one  time  were  very  nearly 
of  the  same  opinion  as  the  newspapers,  and  in 
their  discussions  of  this  question  attempted  to 
bring  Lord  Kitchener  to  their  way  of  thinking; 
but  he  stuck  obstinately  to  his  guns,  refused  to 
budge,  and  brought  the  Cabinet  to  see  the  rea- 
sonableness of  his  judgment. 

It  may  be  said  at  this  point  that  Lord  Kitch- 
ener's relations  with  the  Cabinet,  which  might 

57 


KITCHENER 

have  been  somewhat  difficult,  are  in  truth  of  a 
quite  cordial  and  cheerful  character.  One  can 
imagine  that  in  any  animated  discussions  he 
would  play  a  minor  part  to  such  quick  and  vig- 
orous thinkers  as  Mr.  Lloyd  George  and  Mr. 
Winston  Churchill,  and  this,  indeed,  is  true;  but 
it  seems  that  Lord  Kitchener  has  not  resented 
this  intellectual  superiority  of  his  colleagues. 
On  the  contrary,  he  has  listened  to  many  argu- 
ments which  must  have  been  entirely  new  to 
him,  the  early  sullenness  and  rather  grudging 
acquiescence,  natural  in  the  circumstances,  giv- 
ing gradual  place  to  a  half -humorous  and  as  it 
were  tolerant  acceptance  of  the  position.  For 
Mr.  Asquith  he  entertains  a  great  and  real  re- 
spect, and  it  is  pleasant  to  know  that  he  has 
introduced  into  the  Cabinet  a  wise  military 
habit,  always  addressing  his  chief  as  "Sir."  He 
is  not  an  easy  man  to  convince,  and  he  has  oc- 
cupied places  of  almost  autocratic  power  too 
long  to  be  comfortably  at  home  in  a  council 
chamber.  It  says  very  much  for  his  capacity,  I 
think,  that  he  has  been  able  to  accommodate 
himself  to  this  unfamiliar  position,  and,  in  the 
company  of  men  inspired  by  principles  which 
must  be  entirely  foreign  to  his  own  notions,  has 
adapted  himself  without  any  blunder  to  the  cir- 
cumstances of  the  times. 

58 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

Many  stories  are  told  of  his  Cabinet  experi- 
ences, but  few  are  true.  One  story,  which  happens 
to  be  true,  and  which  very  well  exemplifies  both 
Lord  Kitchener's  acquiescence  and  his  good 
humour,  cannot,  unfortunately,  be  publicly  told. 
There  is,  however,  a  true  story  of  his  War  Office 
experiences  which  may  be  related  in  print.  Mr. 
Lloyd  George  called  one  day  upon  Lord  Kitch- 
ener to  explain  to  him  that  recruiting  in  Wales 
would  be  far  quicker  if  the  men  were  told  that 
they  would  form  a  Welsh  army  and  serve  under 
a  Welsh  general  who  understood  their  traditions 
and  spoke  their  language.  "But  where  is  your 
Welsh  general?"  demanded  Kitchener,  who  does 
not  greatly  like  to  be  bothered  with  details  of 
nationalism.  "We  had  better  discuss  that  with 
Colonel  Owen  Thomas,  who  has  come  with  me, 
and  is  now  in  your  waiting-room."  Kitchener 
rang  his  bell  and  gave  orders  for  the  visitor  to  be 
admitted.  As  soon  as  he  saw  him  he  said,  "You 
were  in  South  Africa?"  "Yes,  sir,"  replied  the 
colonel.  "Well,  you're  now  Brigadier-General 
Commanding  the  Welsh  army;  you'd  better  go 
and  get  to  work  at  once." 

This  swiftness  of  decision  has  not  been  usual 
with  Lord  Kitchener  of  recent  years,  but  on 
occasion,  when  his  mind  is  settled  about  a  thing, 
he  makes  other  men  move  more  swiftly  than  is 

59 


KITCHENER 

altogether  comfortable.  It  is  said  that  he  has 
created  dissatisfaction  at  the  War  Office  by  ruth- 
lessly discharging  men  who  have  not  immediately 
responded  to  commands  something  too  peremp- 
tory for  pleasant  obedience.  He  is  more  sensi- 
tive to  certain  forms  of  criticism  than  the  Kitch- 
ener legend  would  lead  us  to  suppose,  and  woe 
betide  the  official  through  whose  mistake  or 
neglect  the  War  Office  comes  in  for  public  attack. 
Sensational  stories  are  told  of  Lord  Kitch- 
ener's visits  to  France  since  the  outbreak  of  war. 
It  is  said  —  and  for  a  long  time  I  believed  it  —  that, 
after  General  Smith-Dorrien's  brilliant  rescue  of 
the  British  Army  from  almost  certain  annihila- 
tion, Kitchener  went  over  to  France  and  had 
one  French  general  shot  and  two  French  generals 
thrown  into  prison.  There  was  some  ground  for 
this  exciting  story,  but  as  it  is  told  it  is  entirely 
untrue.  What  Kitchener  has  done  —  and  he  de- 
serves the  highest  praise  for  it — is  to  secure 
greater  and  more  friendly  cooperation  between 
the  chiefs  of  the  two  armies.  At  the  beginning 
of  such  a  war,  friction  between  the  heads  of 
armies  in  alliance  is  almost  certain  to  occur,  even 
when  the  troops  themselves  are  in  the  most 
hearty  and  affectionate  relation  with  each  other. 
Some  such  friction  arose  in  this  instance,  and, 
by  a  timely  visit  and  very  wise  diplomacy,  Lord 

60 


LORD  KITCHENER  LEAVING  THE  WAR  OFFICE 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

Kitchener  was  able  not  only  to  remove  the 
causes  of  friction,  but  to  bring  the  generals  in 
question  into  quite  cordial  relationship.  It  is 
not  true,  however,  if  my  information  is  correct, 
that  Lord  Kitchener  has  been  to  the  front.  I 
understand  that  the  French  War  Secretary, 
whom  he  met  in  Paris,  convinced  him  that  it 
would  not  be  wise  for  him  to  pay  that  visit. 

If  one  were  asked  what  Kitchener  has  done  at 
the  War  Office  to  earn  the  gratitude  of  the  nation, 
keeping  one's  self  entirely  to  the  field  of  military 
administration,  it  would  be  extremely  difficult 
to  name  even  one  achievement.  His  greatest 
service  has  been  the  contribution  of  his  legend- 
ary personality,  for  even  in  the  field  of  military 
administration  this  tremendous  reputation  has 
had  a  certain  effect.  Tommy  swears  by  him. 
But  beyond  this  I  do  not  know  what  credit  the 
critical  British  officer  would  give  to  the  new  Sec- 
retary for  War.  The  delay  in  clothing  and  equip- 
ping the  men  of  what  we  call  Kitchener's  first 
army  has  been  prolonged  to  a  point  which  can- 
not escape  censure,  and  there  are  sound  judges 
who  hold  that  this  tiresome  and  irritating  if  not 
dangerous  delay  might  have  been  sensibly 
abridged  if  Lord  Kitchener,  the  autocrat,  had 
been  more  open  to  suggestions  and  more  willing 
to  depute  authority.  He  has  not  succeeded,  so 

61 


KITCHENER 

far  as  I  am  able  to  discover,  in  speeding  up  the 
work  of  the  War  Office,  and  he  has  certainly 
introduced  no  new  and  far-reaching  changes 
which  a  bolder,  more  brilliant,  and  less  obstinate 
man,  in  so  pressing  a  necessity,  might  have  ven- 
tured his  own  reputation  upon  for  the  good  of 
the  army. 

In  spite  of  this,  it  remains  to  be  seen  whether 
these  new  armies  will  not  surprise  Lord  Kitch- 
ener's critics  when  they  take  the  field.  Slow  and 
laborious  as  the  War  Secretary's  administration 
may  be,  it  is  nevertheless  inspired  by  his  dogged 
and  unswerving  passion  for  absolute  efficiency. 
Sooner  or  later  the  uniforms  and  boots  will  ap- 
pear, the  rifles  and  bayonets  be  handed  out,  and 
the  troops,  which  at  the  time  of  writing  are  drill- 
ing in  mufti  with  obsolete  rifles,  will  make  their 
appearance  as  a  marching  army. 

Not  till  then  shall  we  be  able  to  judge  rightly 
of  Lord  Kitchener's  administration.  And  one 
must  certainly  bear  hi  mind  that  the  lack  of 
rifles  and  uniforms  is  the  fault  of  Kitchener's 
predecessors,  and  take  into  our  consideration  the 
undeniable  fact  that  the  War  Office  never  con- 
templated the  raising  of  so  prodigious  an  army. 

If  Kitchener  has  not  speeded  up  the  war  ma- 
chine as  we  could  have  wished  it  to  be  speeded 
up,  at  least  he  has  not  fussed  and  fumed,  and 

62 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

this,  in  the  circumstances,  must  be  counted  to 
him  for  a  virtue.  From  the  very  first  he  has  ex- 
ercised a  calming  authority.  Never  once  has  he 
betrayed  the  least  symptoms  of  hysterics.  When 
the  German  war  machine  unmasked  itself  and 
the  whole  world  stood  at  gaze  before  a  mechan- 
ism so  perfect  and  gigantic  that  to  east  and  west 
of  its  frontiers  it  could  fling  out  irrefragable  hosts 
of  disciplined  fighting  men,  Kitchener,  having 
despatched  Great  Britain's  very  small  but  very 
perfect  expeditionary  force,  calmly  sat  down  be- 
hind the  still  unbroken  shield  of  the  British  Navy 
to  raise  an  army  of  half  a  million  men.  Then  as 
the  war  proceeded,  shivering  to  atoms  most  of 
the  theories  of  the  experts,  Kitchener  asked  for 
another  500,000  men;  and  now  the  War  Office 
speaks  of  an  army  exceeding  2,000,000  men. 
Throughout  this  most  trying  and  difficult  period, 
Lord  Kitchener  never  once,  by  anything  he  said 
or  did,  spread  the  feeling  of  panic.  His  very 
slowness  helped  excitable  people  to  keep  their 
heads  and  to  see  the  crisis  in  its  true  proportions. 
I  am  not  at  all  sure  whether  a  more  brilliant  and 
imaginative  Secretary  of  State  for  War  might 
not  have  acted  unhappily  on  the  nation's  nerves. 
But  Kitchener's  fame  remains  in  Egypt.  He 
added  very  little  to  his  reputation  in  South 
Africa  and  has  left  no  such  monuments  in  India 

63 


KITCHENER 

as  were  left  by  Lord  Roberts  along  the  Hima- 
layan frontier.  And  at  the  War  Office,  in  this 
supreme  crisis  of  our  national  life,  he  has  really 
done  nothing.  He  has  really  done  nothing,  at- 
tempted nothing,  which  by  the  wildest  reach  of 
imagination  could  be  called  a  master-stroke  of 
genius.  He  is  nothing  more  at  the  War  Office 
than  a  gruff  and  most  dutiful  official,  sparing 
himself  no  pains,  sacrificing  his  days  and  nights, 
struggling  with  all  his  powers  and  with  all  his 
strength  to  fulfil  his  trust,  but  without  vision 
and  without  inspiration. 

It  is  said  that  in  every  discussion  which  has 
taken  place  about  the  defence  of  the  country,  in 
such  instances  as  discovered  a  difference  be- 
tween him  and  his  colleagues,  he  has  always 
been  handsomely  beaten  in  argument.  Mr.  Win- 
ston Churchill,  who  is  soldier  and  sailor,  too,  and 
who  has  a  brain  which  absorbs  information  and 
a  mind  which  seizes  upon  conclusions  with  singu- 
lar rapidity,  easily  bewilders,  confuses,  and  con- 
verts the  very  much  slower  and  wholly  unorig- 
inal brain  of  the  War  Secretary.  Lord  Kitchener 
lives  upon  his  reputation,  but  he  is  still  a  man  of 
such  iron  tenacity  that  he  is  able  to  prolong  this 
existence  with  a  pretty  good  grace.  And  it  is 
possible,  for  he  is  a  modest  and  listening  man  in 
the  company  of  his  equals  and  superiors,  that 

64 


AT  THE  WAR  OFFICE 

his  experience  of  a  very  remarkable  Cabinet  may 
modify  some  of  his  worst  prejudices  and  en- 
lighten his  mind  where  it  is  most  dark. 

But  he  will  be  a  very  indifferent  historian  who, 
pronouncing  judgment  on  these  parlous  times, 
dismisses  Lord  Kitchener  as  a  dry  and  tedious 
official  who  did  nothing  for  the  nation  in  its  hour 
of  trial.  Lord  Kitchener  contributed  his  per- 
sonality, his  reputation,  and  his  name  at  the 
very  moment  when  the  whole  empire  was  hunger- 
ing and  thirsting  for  a  Man.  This  psychological 
service,  as  we  must  again  insist,  was  and  in  a 
lesser  degree  continues  to  be  of  value  to  the 
state.  Kitchener  was,  indeed  and  beyond  all 
question,  the  right  man  who  came  at  the  right 
hour;  and  although  it  is  good  for  the  nation  to 
learn  that  it  does  not  depend  upon  any  one  man 
for  its  safety,  good  for  it  properly  to  appreciate 
the  principles  which  make  the  system  of  its  gov- 
ernment independent  of  the  individual,  still,  for 
the  masses,  a  hero  is  always  a  necessity  and  for 
the  state  is  sometimes  an  advantage. 

Moreover,  as  I  hope  has  been  made  quite 
clear,  while  Lord  Kitchener  is  neither  demigod 
nor  heaven-sent  genius,  he  is  by  no  manner  of 
means  a  bad  Secretary  of  State  for  War.  He 
might  be  quicker,  he  might  call  to  his  side  the 
great  organizers  of  commercial  life,  he  might 

65 


KITCHENER 

in  twenty  different  ways  delegate  his  authority; 
but  when  everything  has  been  urged  against  him 
he  still  remains  at  his  post  as  the  quiet,  unruffled, 
pertinacious,  and  plodding  administrator,  who, 
refusing  to  be  hurried  and  refusing  to  be  turned 
from  his  path,  keeps  his  eyes  steadily  fixed  upon 
one  goal,  and  that  goal  the  honour  and  the  safety 
of  his  country. 

The  soldier  believes  in  him,  the  public  believe 
in  him,  and  his  immediate  staff  are  ready  to 
make  any  sacrifice  he  demands  of  them.  Such  a 
man  may  not  dazzle  the  world,  but,  give  him 
time,  and  with  such  troops  as  the  empire  places 
at  his  disposal,  he  will  assuredly  wear  down  the 
enemy. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

[This  chapter  is  written  by  a  student  of  war  and  sum- 
marizes as  briefly  as  possible  the  chief  engagements  with 
which  Lord  Kitchener  has  been  connected.  It  gives,  I 
think,  a  very  useful  synopsis  of  his  work  in  the  field.] 

LORD  KITCHENER'S  association  with  Egypt 
began  in  1882,  when  he  was  appointed  to  a  cav- 
alry command  in  the  Egyptian  Army,  and  in 
January,  1885,  in  the  Gordon  Relief  Expedition, 
he  accompanied  the  Desert  Column  to  the  Gad- 
kul  Wells.  He  was  actively  employed  during  the 
anxious  period  that  followed  the  fall  of  Khar- 
toum, and  in  the  subjection  of  Osman  Digna  in 
the  Eastern  Sudan,  of  which  province,  towards 
the  close  of  1886,  he  became  Governor-General. 
While  still  holding  this  office,  he  joined  the  troops 
in  the  field,  and  was  wounded  in  an  unsuccessful 
fight  with  the  Dervishes  outside  Suakim.  As 
a  result,  he  was  warned  that  in  future  he  should 
not,  while  holding  this  appointment,  take  part 
in  such  operations,  but  he  commanded  a  Sudan- 
ese brigade  in  the  defeat  of  Osman,  and  was  then 
left  with  a  garrison  of  2000  men  to  defend  the 
place. 

67 


KITCHENER 

The  great  invasion  planned  by  Wad-en-Nejumi 
in  the  spring  of  1889  brought  Kitchener  into  new 
prominence,  and  after  the  fight  at  Argin,  when 
the  Dervish  power  seemed  threatening,  it  be- 
came necessary  to  supplement  his  force.  Two 
Egyptian  battalions,  a  mule  battery,  and  some 
cavalry  were  despatched  to  him  in  haste  at  the 
front,  and  these  forces,  with  a  Sudanese  bat- 
talion, were  under  his  command  in  Sir  Francis 
GrenfelPs  victory  over  the  Dervishes  at  Toski, 
August  3.  Handling  his  troops  with  great  skill, 
he  made  a  detour  with  his  mounted  troops,  and 
cut  off  Nejumi's  retreat,  thus  forcing  the  battle, 
in  the  decision  of  which,  with  much  desperate 
fighting,  he  took  a  leading  part.  Nejumi  was 
killed,  and  Mahdism  received  a  blow  from  which 
it  took  years  to  recover.  The  brave  Dervishes 
had,  of  course,  little  chance,  for  their  fanatical 
courage  was  met  by  trained  and  disciplined  troops, 
British,  Egyptian,  and  Sudanese,  directed  by 
very  skilful  generalship.  Kitchener  rendered 
great  services  in  the  subsequent  fighting,  as  well 
as  in  administrative  work,  and  came  to  be  recog- 
nized as  the  man  of  the  future  in  Egypt. 

In  April,  1892,  he  succeeded  Sir  Francis  Gren- 
fell  as  Sirdar  of  the  Egyptian  Army,  and  his 
influence  soon  inspired  the  policy  of  the  Gov- 
ernment. There  had  been  many  evidences  of 

68 


LORD  KITCHENER  AS  SIRDAR 
(Commander-in-Cbief  of  the  Egyptian  Army) 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

renewed  Dervish  activity.  Kassala  was  threat- 
ened, and  the  Italians  had  been  severely  defeated 
at  Adowa.  The  moment  seemed  favourable  for 
an  active  policy,  both  with  the  object  of  relieving 
the  Italians,  and  of  seizing  a  moment  in  which 
the  Dervishes  were  weakened  by  their  efforts 
elsewhere.  The  Sirdar  had  all  ready,  and  about 
9000  troops  well  organized  and  trained  were 
under  his  own  command.  An  advance  was  also 
desirable  because  the  race  between  the  Powers 
for  possession  of  the  region  of  the  Upper  Nile 
had  begun.  It  was  therefore  determined  to  move 
on  Akasheh  and  then  on  Dongola,  but  the  de- 
cision of  the  British  Government  was  arrived  at 
suddenly,  and  the  story  is  told  that  the  Chief  of 
the  Egyptian  Staff  was  aroused  by  stones  being 
thrown  at  his  window  in  the  middle  of  the  night 
(March  12,  1896)  to  hear  the  intelligence,  and 
that  no  one  was  found  bold  enough  to  awake  and 
inform  the  Sirdar,  who  therefore  received  the 
welcome  news  in  the  morning. 

The  river,  the  desert,  and  the  wells  are  the 
three  great  strategic  factors  in  Egyptian  cam- 
paigning, and  the  Sirdar  soon  proved  himself  a 
master  in  the  use  of  them.  In  the  fighting  at 
Ferket,  June  6,  he  despatched  a  river  column 
under  command  of  Colonel  Hunter,  afterwards 
General  Sir  Archibald  Hunter,  which  marched 


KITCHENER 

up  the  east  bank  of  the  Nile,  with  Egyptian 
irregulars  on  the  other  bank  to  prevent  any 
escape  of  the  Dervishes  across  the  stream.  At 
the  same  time  a  desert  column  under  command 
of  Major  Burn-Murdoch  was  to  operate  on  the 
east,  and  prevent  escape  in  that  direction  also. 
The  Dervishes,  who  were  under  command  of 
Emir  Osman  Azrak,  could  not  avoid  the  action, 
and  the  engagement  developed  exactly  as  the 
Sirdar  had  planned.  The  march  of  the  river 
column  was  irresistible,  and  when  the  Dervishes 
sought  to  escape  eastward,  the  desert  column, 
which  had  been  skilfully  led  in  the  darkness, 
blocked  the  way.  The  Dervishes  fought  with 
the  utmost  courage  and  resolution,  but  they  were 
utterly  defeated,  and  the  Nile  Valley  was  cleared 
of  them  for  a  distance  of  fifty  miles,  while  the  only 
organized  army  of  the  Khalifa  was  destroyed. 

During  subsequent  months  the  railway  was 
carried  onward  to  Kosheh,  the  gunboats  were 
taken  up  the  river  and  supplies  were  pushed  for- 
ward. The  weather  was  intensely  hot,  heavy 
rainstorms  swept  the  valley,  and  cholera,  which 
had  been  coming  north,  reached  the  troops  and 
inflicted  severe  losses.  In  addition,  the  Nile  rose 
late  and  the  dragging  of  the  gunboats  over  the 
Second  Cataract  was  delayed.  But  in  September 
the  advance  was  resumed,  and  the  force  was  so 

70 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

overwhelming  and  so  well  dispersed  that  the 
Dervishes  fled,  and  Dongola  was  occupied,  every 
Dervish  flying  from  the  pressure.  It  was  a  tri- 
umph of  skilful  administration  and  manage- 
ment and  the  troops  were  well  supported  in  the 
advance  of  the  gunboats  under  Commander 
Colville,  R.N.,  afterwards  Admiral  the  Honour- 
able Sir  Stanley  Colville. 

Kitchener's  policy  was  to  advance  slowly,  and 
to  consolidate  and  prepare  everything  as  he 
went  onward.  Therefore  Dongola  was  put  in 
order,  the  railway  was  pushed  on  towards  the 
place,  and  advanced  posts  were  established. 
Whether  it  would  have  been  possible  to  make  an 
immediate  move  forward  it  is  unnecessary  now 
to  inquire.  The  Khalifa  expected  it,  and  im- 
mediately set  about  fortifying  Omdurman.  But 
it  was  not  until  the  next  year,  1897,  that  the  re- 
conquest  of  the  Sudan  was  determined  upon. 
England  had  compelled  the  Egyptians  to  aban- 
don that  province,  and  it  was  announced  on  the 
part  of  the  British  Government  that  responsibil- 
ities had  been  incurred,  which  must  be  fulfilled, 
and  that  the  crumbling  away  of  the  "baleful 
rule  of  the  Khalifa"  made  the  time  opportune 
to  act. 

But  Kitchener  had  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  to  carry  forward  the  railway  in  the  direction 

71 


KITCHENER 

of  Khartoum  was  inadvisable,  the  country  being 
difficult.  The  Nile  between  Wady  Haifa  and 
Khartoum  makes  a  double  curve  like  the  let- 
ter "S,  "and  the  railway  abandoned  would  have 
crossed  the  southern  curve  of  the  "S"  from  Don- 
gola  and  Debbeh  to  reach  Khartoum,  whereas 
the  Sirdar  now  thought  it  advisable  to  strike 
across  the  northern  curve  from  Wady  Haifa  to 
Abu  Hamed.  Fortunately  there  was  at  the  head 
of  the  railway  service  an  engineer  officer  of  first- 
rate  merits,  Colonel  Girouard,  who  pushed  the 
line  on  from  Wady  Haifa  at  the  rate  of  a  mile 
and  a  half  a  day.  This  could,  no  doubt,  have 
been  done  many  months  earlier,  but  the  im- 
portance of  the  Dongola  province  made  it  neces- 
sary first  to  subjugate  it,  and  in  that  province 
were  now  the  friendly  Jaalins,  who  had  been 
exasperated  by  the  cruelties  of  the  Khalifa,  who 
had  decimated  them,  and  they  were  guarding 
the  right  flank  of  the  new  advance. 

So  successful  was  all  this  preparation  and  or- 
ganization directed  by  the  Sirdar,  that  when  the 
new  railway  had  reached  Abu  Hamed,  and  that 
place  had  been  captured  after  a  stiff  fight  by 
Colonel  Hunter,  an  immediate  advance  was 
made,  and  Berber,  which  is  about  a  hundred 
miles  farther  up  the  river,  fell  without  a  blow, 
on  September  6. 

72 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

The  Dervishes  were  strangely  inactive.  If  the 
Emir  Mahmoud,  who  had  10,000  men  at  Metam- 
meh,  which  is  about  a  hundred  miles  up-river 
from  Berber,  had  moved,  the  Sirdar  would  have 
had  a  far  more  difficult  task.  That  place  was 
shelled,  chiefly  by  way  of  reconnaissance,  by  the 
gunboats  under  Commander  Keppel,  afterwards 
Vice-Admiral  Sir  Colin  Keppel.  The  irrepressi- 
ble Osman  Digna,  who  had  appeared  again  in 
force  in  the  Eastern  Sudan,  also  retired  into 
obscurity,  having  quarrelled  with  Mahmoud. 
Progress  was  made  with  the  railway,  which  very 
quickly  advanced  to  Abu  Hamed  and  on  to  Ber- 
ber. 

The  Atbara  falls  into  the  Nile  a  few  miles 
above  Berber,  and  on  one  of  its  affluents,  about 
three  hundred  miles  above  that  place,  is  Kassala, 
on  the  borders  of  Abyssinia,  which  the  Italians 
had  defended  against  the  Dervishes.  It  was  now 
to  be  restored  to  Egypt,  and  the  Sirdar,  by  this 
time  Major-General  Sir  Herbert  Kitchener,  went 
to  Suakim  and  Massowah  to  arrange  the  con- 
ditions of  the  transfer,  and  the  place  was  oc- 
cupied by  Egyptian  troops  on  December  25, 
1897. 

Early  in  1898  it  became  known  that  Mahmoud, 
who  had  now  made  a  pact  with  Osman,  was 
intending  at  last,  with  20,000  men,  to  move 

73 


KITCHENER 

against  Berber.  British  troops  were  therefore 
hurried  up  from  Alexandria,  and  Egyptian  forces 
were  concentrated  to  meet  the  threatened  at- 
tack. On  February  10,  Mahmoud  began  to  pass 
his  troops  across  the  Nile  to  Shendy  preparatory 
to  the  advance,  and  his  boats  and  rafts  occupied 
a  fortnight  in  the  operation.  It  seemed  to  many 
observers  that  in  the  midst  of  this  business  of 
transport  Mahmoud 's  troops  were  given  into 
their  enemy's  hands.  An  ideal  opportunity  pre- 
sented itself  of  destroying  one  half  of  them  before 
the  others  could  come  to  their  aid.  But  nothing 
was  done,  and  the  explanation  given  was  that  it 
was  the  Sirdar's  plan  to  get  Mahmoud  out  of 
his  strong  position  at  Metammeh  and  into  the 
open  ground. 

The  great  danger  was  of  a  frenzied  Dervish 
rush,  which  it  might  be  difficult  to  stop  with 
existing  means.  Therefore  "dum-dum"  bullets 
were  served  out  for  the  Lee-Metford,  while  the 
"dumb  dumb"  methods  applied  by  the  Sirdar 
against  the  press  correspondents  were  to  some 
extent  withdrawn,  concerning  which  one  critic 
said  that  the  general  in  the  field,  who  restricts 
the  press  too  much,  lays  himself  open  to  the 
remark  that,  like  Caesar,  he  prefers  "to  write  his 
own  Commentaries." 

Mahmoud's  object  was  to  cross  the  desert  from 

74 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

the  Nile,  and  pass  over  the  bed  of  the  parched 
Atbara,  in  order  to  strike  at  Berber  from  the 
east.  The  Sirdar  had  now  about  13,000  British 
and  Egyptian  troops,  and  the  main  body  was 
concentrated  at  El  Hudi,  which  place  is  a  few 
miles  up  the  Atbara  from  its  confluence  with  the 
Nile.  Mahmoud  was  now  in  a  difficulty.  He  saw 
that  his  prepared  advance  on  Berber  was  check- 
mated, and  that  a  retirement  on  Omdurman 
would  be  perilous.  The  position  for  the  Sirdar's 
forces  was  not  easy.  They  were  supplied  by 
camel  transport,  the  heat  was  punishing  them 
severely,  and  dysentery  and  enteric  fever  ap- 
peared. It  was  imperative  to  make  a  move,  and 
on  April  4  the  camps  were  struck  and  the  advance 
begun.  General  Hunter,  on  the  next  day,  tried 
to  draw  the  Dervishes  by  advancing  with  eight 
squadron  of  cavalry,  eight  maxims,  and  a  bat- 
tery of  horse  artillery.  Large  bodies  of  Baggara 
horsemen  thereupon  came  out,  and  Hunter  had 
to  make  a  skilful  withdrawal. 

It  was  on  April  8,  that  the  battle  of  the  Atbara 
was  fought.  The  enemy  was  not  to  be  caught  in 
the  open,  as  the  Sirdar  had  hoped.  He  was  forti- 
fied in  a  zeriba  formed  of  cut  mimosa  bushes, 
backed  with  strong  palisades,  and  behind 
an  encircling  trench,  with  earthworks,  cross- 
trenches,  and  shelters.  But  twenty-four  guns 

75 


KITCHENER 

were  brought  to  bear,  the  palisades  were  blown 
away,  and  a  rocket  battery  set  the  Dervish  shel- 
ter in  furious  conflagration.  Only  a  few  Baggara 
horsemen  appeared,  and  were  swept  away  with 
maxims.  After  the  position  had  been  pounded 
for  an  hour  and  a  half  with  shell,  the  advance 
began,  the  Sirdar  watching  the  development  of 
his  plans  from  an  advantageous  post  nine  hun- 
dred yards  away. 

The  pipes  of  the  Highlander,  the  bugles  of  the 
other  British  regiments,  and  the  bands  of  the 
Egyptian  battalions  playing  inspiriting  tunes 
gave  a  fine  military  spirit  to  the  long  line  which 
advanced  with  fixed  bayonets.  General  Gatacre 
and  his  aide-de-camp  were  the  first  men  to  reach 
the  Dervish  outer  defences.  The  Camerons  were 
to  have  driven  a  way  through  for  the  other  bat- 
talions to  rush  into  the  midst  of  the  enemy,  but 
this  was  impossible,  and  the  Camerons  led,  fol- 
lowed by  other  regiments.  Then  the  hand-to- 
hand  fighting  began.  The  Dervishes  in  the 
trenches  neither  asked  nor  received  quarter. 
They  were  armed  with  Remingtons,  Martinis, 
fowling-pieces,  and  elephant-guns.  The  Egyp- 
tians, who  were  on  the  right,  lost  heavily,  and 
the  British  had  five  officers  and  twenty-one  men 
killed,  and  ninety-nine  officers  and  men  wounded. 
The  Dervishes  were  soon  utterly  routed.  They 

76 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

had  fought  bravely,  but  their  fire  was  ineffec- 
tive, and  the  mounted  men  were  with  Osman 
Digna  and  not  present.  It  was  a  fine  fight  and 
a  striking  success,  but  the  Dervishes  were  hope- 
lessly outclassed  by  the  well-trained  forces  op- 
posed to  them,  who  were  amply  provided  with 
efficient  guns  and  rifles.  The  Emir  Mahmoud, 
slightly  wounded,  was  captured,  and  brought 
before  the  Sirdar,  where  the  following  colloquy 
is  recorded  to  have  taken  place:  The  Sirdar: 
"Why  have  you  come  into  my  country  to  burn 
and  kill?"  Mahmoud:  "As  a  soldier  I  obey  the 
Khalifa's  orders,  as  you  must  the  Khedive's." 
The  Emir  also  declared  that  he  was  not  a  woman 
to  run  away! 

The  battle  of  the  Atbara  was  the  penultimate 
blow  at  the  power  of  the  Khalifa  Mustapha. 
Kitchener,  more  than  a  soldier,  a  diplomatist 
and  searcher  of  the  spirits  of  men,  who  had  him- 
self, disguised,  speaking  Arabic  like  a  native, 
walked  among  the  Dervishes  in  the  bazaars,  had 
prepared  all  well.  Resourceful  and  strong-willed, 
knowing  what  he  wanted  and  resolved  to  secure 
it,  he  would  not  budge  an  inch  until  he  saw 
whither  he  was  going,  and,  like  an  old  Roman, 
he  had  built  the  roads  his  men  should  traverse, 
and  so,  step  by  step,  he  was  advancing  towards 
Khartoum.  He  had  able  lieutenants  who  did  the 

77 


KITCHENER 

fighting  —  Hunter,  Gatacre,  Broadwood,  Max- 
well, Wauchope,  Lyttelton,  and  many  more. 
There  were  risks  to  be  run,  but  upon  the  success 
of  this  campaign  the  future  of  Egypt  hung. 
Thinking  of  this,  —  it  was  after  the  Atbara,  — 
as  a  witness  recorded,  there  was  wrung  from 
Kitchener  the  exclamation,  "My  God!  if  I  had 
failed!" 

But  where  there  is  a  soldier  who  spares  neither 
himself  nor  those  under  him,  and  who  carries 
on  the  administration  of  an  army  as  Kitchener 
did,  there  is  small  likelihood  of  failure.  It  was 
in  May  that  preparations  for  the  advance  on 
Khartoum  began.  At  Fort  Atbara  three  months' 
provisions  for  25,000  men  were  stored,  and  at 
Abadieh  an  arsenal  and  repair-shops  were  estab- 
lished for  the  flotillas.  A  second  British  brigade 
was  prepared  for  embarkation,  and  Gatacre  took 
command  of  the  division  thus  constituted.  The 
total  strength  was  7500  British  and  12,500 
Egyptians. 

The  Sirdar  left  for  the  front  on  August  13. 
The  flotilla  rendered  the  utmost  service  as  a 
means  of  transport,  and  successive  batches  of 
men  were  hurried  forward.  Wad  Hamid  was 
passed,  and  reconnaissance  showed  that  the 
Khalifa  had  abandoned  the  forts  at  the  Sha- 
bluka  Gorge,  which  is  at  the  southern  end  of  the 

78 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

Sixth  Cataract.  The  troops  could  have  turned 
them,  and  the  Khalifa  had  reserved  his  strength 
for  the  coming  battle  at  Omdurman. 

At  that  capital  of  the  Khalifa  stood  the  white 
tomb  of  the  Mahdi,  which  was  first  seen  by  the 
reconnaissance  party,  who  had  pushed  on  to  the 
island  of  Jebel  Rogan,  which  is  about  thirty- 
four  miles  below  Khartoum.  It  is  said  that  Major 
Staveley  Gordon,  General  Gordon's  nephew, 
was  the  first  to  set  eyes  upon  it.  Intense  heat 
and  violent  storms,  with  terrific  downpours, 
marked  the  stages  of  the  advance,  of  which  El 
Hajir,  Wady  Abid,  Suruab,  and  Egeiga  were  the 
stages,  the  last-named  place  being  only  six  miles 
from  Omdurman.  It  was  reached  at  about  1  P.M. 
on  September  1,  and  when  the  cavalry  rode  out 
to  the  Jebel  Surgham  slopes,  the  whole  army  of 
the  Khalifa,  some  50,000  strong,  was  discovered, 
formed  in  five  divisions,  advancing  to  the  attack. 
But  this  advance  soon  stopped,  and  the  Dervishes 
were  seen  to  be  preparing  then*  bivouacs  and 
camp-fires.  It  was  bad  generalship,  for  if  they 
had  come  on  in  force,  before  the  Sirdar's  troops 
could  deploy,  the  situation  would  have  become 
difficult  for  the  latter.  Meanwhile  Commander 
Keppel  had  gone  forward  with  his  flotilla,  and  had 
landed  a  howitzer  battery,  which  had  opened 
fire  at  three  thousand  yards  and  partly  destroyed 

79 


KITCHENER 

the  dome  over  the  Mahdi's  tomb.  The  night  was 
one  of  anxiety  in  the  Sirdar's  camps,  for  the 
Khalifa  might,  with  much  advantage  on  his  side, 
have  attempted  a  night  attack,  and  the  men  lay 
fully  dressed  on  the  sand,  with  their  arms  beside 
them.  The  total  force  with  the  Sirdar  was  then 
about  22,000  men. 

The  troops  stood  to  their  arms  about  an  hour 
before  sunrise  on  September  2,  in  anticipation 
of  an  attack,  but  the  Dervishes  did  not  move, 
and  Kitchener  resolved  to  advance.  The  bom- 
bardment from  the  gunboats  was  resumed,  and 
then  the  Dervish  hosts  were  seen  to  be  in  move- 
ment. The  Sirdar's  army  was  disposed  upon  a 
curved  front,  its  extremities  resting  on  the  Nile, 
and  the  gunboats  being  on  either  flank.  The 
Dervishes  came  on  in  great  force  and  with  mil- 
itary regularity  from  the  left  round  the  slopes 
of  Jebel  Surgham,  to  attack  the  centre,  while 
a  right  attack,  which  was  not  pressed  home,  was 
seen  developing  round  the  heights  of  Kerreri. 

A  battery  of  artillery  and  some  machine-guns 
inflicted  great  losses  upon  the  Dervishes,  but  did 
not  stop  their  advancing.  The  British  infantry 
opened  fire  in  volleys  and  independently,  and 
a  rain  of  lead  fell  upon  the  Dervish  spearmen, 
who  were  advancing  in  rushes.  When  they  came 
within  eight  hundred  yards  this  fire  became  very 

80 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

deadly,  and  the  ground  was  soon  strewn  with 
the  dead  and  wounded.  Some  of  them  ap- 
proached within  two  hundred  yards,  only  to  fall 
before  the  pitiless  fire.  There  were  scarcely  any 
British  casualties,  until  some  Dervish  riflemen 
lodged  on  Jebel  Surgham  opened  fire.  Then 
some  of  the  British  fell,  but  the  enemy  were  soon 
driven  off.  By  8  A.M.  the  Dervish  attack  had 
slackened,  and  they  were  retiring  rapidly,  except 
that  on  the  right  the  Khalifa's  son,  Sheikh-ed- 
Din,  and  Wad  Helu  attacked  Colonel  Broad- 
wood  in  great  force.  There  was  much  hand-to- 
hand  fighting,  and  the  position  would  have  been 
serious  if  one  of  the  gunboats  had  not  opened 
fire  and  driven  off  these  brave  but  unequal 
assailants. 

So  ended  the  first  stage  of  the  battle.  The  sec- 
ond began  with  a  cavalry  melee  on  the  left,  in 
which  a  lancer  regiment  charged  a  body  of  Der- 
vishes, and  lost  both  officers  and  men.  The  enemy 
were  found  in  unexpected  strength  in  a  hollow 
place,  where  the  British  mounted  men  were  at  a 
disadvantage.  While  this  was  in  progress  the 
Sirdar  had  ordered,  at  8.30  A.M.,  a  general  ad- 
vance on  Omdurman,  but  it  was  then  discovered 
that  the  Khalifa,  with  about  40,000  men,  was 
behind  the  height  of  Jebel  Surgham.  Mac- 
donald's  brigade  was  attacked  by  some  20,000 

81 


KITCHENER 

men,  preceded  by  Baggara  horsemen  com- 
manded by  the  Khalifa  himself.  But  the  horse- 
men were  swept  away,  and  machine-gun  and 
rifle  fire  proved  deadly  to  the  close  ranks  of  the 
Dervishes,  whose  bodies  soon  strewed  the  plain. 
Not  a  man  got  within  three  hundred  yards  of  the 
fighting-line. 

But  now  on  the  right  other  hosts  were  ad- 
vancing, and  Macdonald  wheeled  about,  re- 
ceiving reinforcements,  and  a  pitiless  fire  was 
opened,  particularly  by  the  Sudanese,  under 
whose  hail  of  lead  nothing  could  live.  Mac- 
donald had  handled  his  troops  with  masterly 
skill,  and  had  snatched  victory  from  the  jaws 
of  peril.  The  brigades  of  Lewis  and  Wauchope 
were  with  him  at  this  critical  moment.  The 
slaughter  among  the  Dervishes  was  fearful, 
nearly  11,000  being  killed,  and  as  the  troops  ad- 
vanced and  cut  off  the  retreat  of  the  main  body 
to  Omdurman,  the  flight  became  a  rout,  and  the 
fugitives  escaped  to  the  south. 

This  was  the  final  triumph,  which  the  Sirdar 
had  won  by  masterly  organization  and  prepara- 
tion, and  by  skilfully  disposing  his  forces.  Good 
generalship,  as  we  have  seen,  had  also  been 
found  in  his  lieutenants,  to  whom  the  actual 
success  in  the  fighting  was  very  largely  due.  He 
mentioned  them  all,  and  many  officers,  very 

82 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

liberally  in  his  despatches.  The  Sirdar  described 
the  result  of  the  action  as  being  "  the  practical 
annihilation  of  the  Khalifa's  army,  the  con- 
sequent extinction  of  Mahdism  in  the  Sudan, 
and  the  submission  of  nearly  the  whole  country 
formerly  ruled  under  Egyptian  authority."  The 
power  of  modern  armies  had  been  demonstrated, 
and  not  less  of  the  fine  administration  of  mili- 
tary means,  both  personal  and  material.  The 
Khalifa  had  failed  as  a  general.  If  he  had  at- 
tacked at  night,  when  British  fire  would  not  have 
been  so  effective,  or  if  he  had  remained  within 
his  entrenchments  and  defences  at  Omdurman, 
he  would  have  imposed  a  harder  task  on  his 
assailants.  The  total  loss  in  the  Sirdar's  army 
was  forty-eight  killed  and  three  hundred  and 
eighty-two  wounded.  The  British  killed  were 
two  officers  and  twenty-five  men,  twenty-one  of 
them  in  the  lancer  charge  referred  to. 

For  these  services  Sir  Herbert  Kitchener  was 
created  Baron  Kitchener  of  Khartoum,  and  a 
sum  of  £30,000  was  awarded  to  him. 

Omdurman  was  occupied,  the  Khalifa's  Euro- 
pean captives  were  liberated,  and  the  British 
and  Egyptian  flags  were  hoisted  at  Khartoum. 
The  Khalifa  had  fled  with  the  remnant  of  his 
followers,  the  fighting  was  done,  and  nearly  all 
the  British  troops  returned  to  Cairo. 

83 


KITCHENER 

Reference  may  now  be  made  to  the  Fashoda 
incident.  On  September  7,  one  of  Gordon's  old 
steamboats,  which  was  in  the  Khalifa's  service, 
returned  to  Omdurman,  but  to  find  a  new  flag 
flying  there.  Her  captain  surrendered  and  re- 
ported that  at  Fashoda,  on  the  White  Nile,  he 
had  been  fired  on  by  a  party  of  white  men.  This 
was  the  expeditionary  force  of  Major  Marchand 
and  his  Senegalese.  The  Sirdar  thereupon  pro- 
ceeded to  Fashoda,  and  told  the  French  officer, 
who  said  he  was  acting  under  the  order  of  his 
Government,  that  the  presence  of  a  French  force 
was  an  infringement  of  the  rights  of  Egypt  by 
the  French  Government.  A  very  strained  feel- 
ing arose  out  of  this  incident  between  the  British 
and  French  Governments,  but  after  a  long  dip- 
lomatic correspondence  the  matter  was  amiably 
settled,  and  Major  Marchand  and  his  troops 
returned  to  France. 

Lord  Kitchener  was  still  at  Khartoum,  build- 
ing a  new  city,  and  organizing  a  new  adminis- 
tration to  replace  the  vanished  Dervish  rule,  of 
which  the  last  fragments  had  been  crushed  by  his 
lieutenants,  when  he  was  summoned  to  act  as 
Chief  of  the  Staff  with  Lord  Roberts,  who  was 
about  to  proceed,  in  December,  1899,  to  South 
Africa  to  take  up  the  command  against  the 
Boers,  after  the  weary  movements  and  strange 

84 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

blunderings  of  British  generals  on  the  upper 
Tugela.  In  the  Egyptian  campaigns  and  the 
conquest  of  the  Sudan,  brilliant  as  they  were, 
there  had  been  hardly  any  opportunities  for  the 
display  of  high  strategy,  tactical  skill,  or  genius 
for  command.  The  Nile  and  the  railway  that 
ran  alongside  it  and  crossed  one  of  its  great  sin- 
uosities, had  been  the  line  of  approach.  The 
strategy  was  always  direct  and  frontal,  for  the 
desert  protected  both  flanks.  The  great  merit  of 
Lord  Kitchener  had  been  his  talent  for  admin- 
istration, his  foresight,  his  slow  but  certain  prog- 
ress towards  his  object,  and  the  rigid  economy 
with  which  he  built  up  and  maintained  his  army. 
In  South  Africa  the  situation  was  entirely  dif- 
ferent. There  was  no  narrow  limitation  of  space 
or  opportunity.  The  enemy  was  alert  and  elusive, 
and  though  the  business  of  maintaining  the  army 
depended,  in  the  new  plans,  on  a  single  line  of 
railway,  that  line  was  long  and  exposed  to  attack 
on  every  side.  What  Lord  Roberts  expected  from 
Kitchener,  who  had  been  appointed  at  his  own 
request,  was  not  brilliant  and  rapid  strategy,  but 
sure  calculation  and  inflexible  strength.  Kitch- 
ener possessed  the  power  of  decision  and  dis- 
tinction, and  he  consistently  eliminated  the  per- 
sonal factor,  depending  for  success  on  energy, 
organization,  and  numbers.  The  staff  organiza- 

85 


KITCHENER 

tion  of  the  British  Army  was  not  complete,  and, 
as  Chief  of  the  Staff,  Kitchener  became  Lord 
Roberts's  right-hand  man,  ready  to  undertake 
any  organizing  work,  such  as  the  reorganizing 
of  the  transport  and  intelligence  departments, 
or  to  implant  energy  where  it  was  wanting. 

As  Chief  of  the  Staff,  Kitchener  was  not  re- 
sponsible for  the  strategical  plans  or  the  general- 
ship, though  he  was  not  without  influence  on  both. 
These  plans  brought  about  the  crossing  of  the 
Orange  River  without  fighting,  the  turning  of  the 
Boers'  front,  the  threatening  of  their  communi- 
cations and  of  their  capital,  and  the  opening  of 
the  whole  country  to  the  British  to  march  where 
they  chose.  There  was  no  such  impasse  as  had 
been  reached  on  the  Tugela.  The  Modder  Drifts 
were  seized  by  French  and  his  cavalry,  Cronje 
was  driven  from  his  lines,  and  Kimberley  was 
relieved,  though  Cronje  slipped  through. 

The  Boers  had  been  outmanoeuvred  and  cap- 
tured, but  the  blow  had  not  fallen.  In  the  busi- 
ness of  the  pursuit  of  Cronje,  General  Kelly- 
Kenny  was  nominally  in  command,  "  but,"  said 
Lord  Roberts,  "Lord  Kitchener  is  with  you  for  the 
purpose  of  communicating  my  orders."  In  prac- 
tice Kitchener  was  the  driving  force,  and  when 
Cronje  had  taken  refuge  at  Paardeberg,  Kitch- 
ener's idea  was  to  rush  his  laager  at  once,  an- 

86 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

nihilate  his  force,  and  march  straight  on  Bloem- 
fontein. 

But  Kitchener's  resolution  to  attack  has  been 
criticized  on  the  ground  that  the  object  would 
have  been  attained  by  occupying  the  surround- 
ing positions,  concerning  which  it  must  be  ob- 
served that  Kitchener  did  not  know  what  Boer 
reinforcements  might  arrive.  The  actual  attack 
directed  by  Kitchener  was  certainly  defective, 
two  out  of  four  brigades  being  thrown  away 
in  a  frontal  advance  without  cover  and  on  the 
wrong  side  of  the  river,  while  the  flank  attacks 
were  not  in  sufficient  force,  and  orders  were  con- 
fused. This  may  be  ascribed  to  Kitchener's  des- 
perate eagerness  to  attack,  and  to  his  limited 
tactical  experience.  His  ambiguous  status  in  the 
field  complicated  the  difficulty.  The  assault  was 
abandoned,  and  Cronje  soon  afterwards  surren- 
dered. Subsequently  Kitchener  was  charged  with 
the  duty  of  repairing  the  railway  and  the  bridges 
over  the  Orange  River. 

The  plans  whereby  Bloemfontein  was  occu- 
pied and  Ladysmith  and  Kimberley  relieved 
were  Lord  Roberts's  own.  So,  too,  after  a  six 
weeks'  interval,  there  was  the  rapid  advance  by 
which  Johannesburg  and  Pretoria  were  occu- 
pied, the  issue  of  the  campaign  being  thus  de- 
cided, though  another  leap  was  required  which 

87 


KITCHENER 

carried  Roberts  to  Komatipoort.  Then  Lord 
Roberts,  in  December,  1900,  returned  to  England, 
and  Lord  Kitchener  assumed  the  command. 
During  the  previous  months  he  had  been  actively 
employed,  and  was  concerned  in  Lord  Methuen's 
pursuit  of  De  Wet,  who  once  came  very  near  to 
capturing  Kitchener  himself. 

In  February  and  March,  1901,  Lord  Kitchener 
made  efforts  to  conclude  the  campaign  by  nego- 
tiation, but  President  Kruger  by  cable  coun- 
selled protracted  resistance,  and  President  Steyn 
adopted  the  same  line,  looking  for  some  outside 
intervention.  Kitchener  then,  with  the  utmost 
energy,  set  about  a  series  of  vigorous  operations 
by  which  the  country  was  to  be  swept  from  end 
to  end,  large  numbers  of  mounted  men  being 
required,  but  before  they"arrived  Kitchener  had 
delivered  some  shrewd  blows  at  the  enemy.  The 
blockhouse  plan  and  the  scheme  of  gathering 
the  civil  population  into  camps  were  his.  He 
created  a  great  organization,  and  the  columns 
of  Gorringe,  Crabbe,  Henniker,  Scobell,  Doran, 
Kavanagh,  Alexander,  and  others  carried  out  his 
plans. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  describe  the  operations 
which  brought  the  war  to  a  close.  They  were 
prolonged  and  chequered,  but  brought  about 
the  ultimate  success  of  British  arms  and  the 

88 


KITCHENER'S  BATTLES 

settlement  of  South  Africa.  For  his  services 
Lord  Kitchener  was  promoted  to  be  Lieuten- 
ant-General and  General,  was  given  a  vis- 
county,  and  received  the  thanks  of  Parliament 
and  a  grant  of  £50,000.  For  great  strategy  the 
campaigns  had  offered  no  opportunities,  and  the 
occasions  for  generalship  in  command  were  few, 
but  Kitchener  had  again  proved  himself  a  won- 
derful organizer  and  administrator  in  the  mili- 
tary sphere,  and  he  possessed  the  supreme  merit 
of  clearly  recognizing  the  end,  combined  with 
a  precise  and  detailed  knowledge  of  the  means 
by  which  it  could  be  attained. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

DULL  and  tiresome,  brilliant  and  wonderful, 
—  whichever  his  career  may  be,  —  Kitchener 
himself,  Kitchener  the  man,  the  domestic  unit, 
the  poor  fallible  human  brother,  must  be  inter- 
esting —  interesting  to  the  gossip  and  interest- 
ing to  the  peering  and  appraising  psychologist. 

What  manner  of  creature  is  this  tall,  heavy, 
fierce,  and  rather  truculent-looking  man  who 
strides  about  in  the  popular  imagination  with 
the  inexorableness  of  destiny  and  whose  eyes, 
brooding  on  the  confusion  of  human  disarrange- 
ments, are  mystic  with  the  propulsive  force  of 
the  Universal  Will? 

The  little  chalk-faced,  mild-mannered  clerk 
loves  to  relate  stories  of  Kitchener's  iron  disci- 
pline and  hugs  himself  over  any  incident  which 
acquaints  him  with  brutality  of  his  hero's  mind. 
The  least  pugilistic  Sunday-school  teacher  adores 
in  Kitchener  qualities  which  in  himself,  beyond 
a  doubt,  would  incur  the  everlasting  torments  of 
divine  displeasure.  Ascetic  and  charming  clergy- 
men, poets,  painters,  musicians,  and  philanthro- 

90 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

pists,  editors  of  Liberal  newspapers,  Socialist 
lecturers,  pacifists,  vegetarians,  and  the  whole 
company  of  those  who  compose  the  army  of 
Sweetness  and  Light,  see  in  Kitchener  not  only 
the  Man  of  Destiny  and  the  Man  for  "The  Day," 
but  a  Man  whose  personality  is  in  itself  an  excel- 
lence —  as  beguiling,  enchanting,  and  intoxicat- 
ing as  forbidden  fruit. 

Publicly  everybody  is  ready  to  acquiesce  in 
the  gospel  of  civilization,  the  gospel  of  Chris- 
tianity, and  to  say  that  the  greatest  of  things  is 
love;  but  privately  the  citizen,  whose  furniture, 
larder,  and  salary  are  the  acrid  envy  of  watchful 
foes,  is  apt  to  consider  the  gospel  of  Christianity 
an  experiment  in  idealism  and  to  hold  the  sterner 
faith  which  has  been  so  sedulously,  frankly,  and 
successfully  preached  in  Germany  for  the  last 
forty  years.  We  must  be  invincible.  Look  to 
your  guns! 

But  is  Kitchener  of  Khartoum,  in  fact,  the 
tremendous  person  of  popular  imagination?  We 
have  already  suggested  that  he  is  of  a  milder 
brand. 

In  a  man  so  victorious  and  inevitable  there 
must  be  an  element  of  Prussian  sternness,  if  not 
brutality,  and  we  may  say  at  once  that  popular 
imagination  has  something  to  go  upon  in  its  idea 
of  this  British  national  hero  pro  tern.  We  shall 

91 


KITCHENER 

tell  two  stories  which  justify  the  public  convic- 
tion. Kitchener  can  be  excessively  hard,  and  al- 
most inhumanly  brutal.  But  this  by  no  means 
exhausts  his  character.  There  are  other  sides  to 
him.  Indeed,  one  may  say  that  his  brutality  is 
rather  an  accident  of  his  ambition  than  one  of 
his  original  elements,  for  the  man  was  nothing 
of  a  bully  as  a  boy,  and  from  youth  to  the  present 
day  has  been  naturally  and  profoundly  shy. 

Ambition  was  the  earliest  manifestation  of  his 
character.  But  even  this  distinguishing  charac- 
teristic began  its  career  modestly  and  tamely. 
He  wanted  to  swim  well  and  ride  well,  but  he 
never  risked  his  boy's  neck  at  either  game.  In 
youth  he  made  up  his  mind  to  pass  an  examina- 
tion. As  a  lieutenant  of  Engineers  his  growing 
sense  of  uncommon  powers  led  him  no  farther 
afield  than  map-drawing  in  Palestine.  Here  he 
learned  to  know  that  the  management  of  men  is 
not  so  difficult  a  thing  as  it  seems  to  youth,  and 
life  became  a  pleasanter  adventure  than  the 
classrooms  of  Woolwich  had  led  him  to  suppose. 
Then  came  Egypt,  and  with  Egypt  ambition  was 
in  supreme  command  of  Kitchener's  soul. 

A  brother  of  the  present  writer  was  a  cadet  at 
the  Royal  Military  College  of  Sandhurst  at  a 
time  when  one  of  Kitchener's  brothers  was  on  the 
staff  of  lecturers.  It  happened  one  day  —  this 

92 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

was  in  the  early  eighties  —  that  my  brother  was 
walking  in  the  grounds  of  the  college  with  Kitch- 
ener's brother,  and  as  they  went  along  the  lec- 
turer said  to  the  cadet,  "My  young  brother  has 
just  got  himself  appointed  to  Egypt;  he'll  never 
come  out  till  he's  at  the  top."  This  remark 
amused  my  brother  as  a  piece  of  family  conceit, 
for  he  had  never  even  heard  of  Herbert  Kitch- 
ener ;  but  it  shows  one  that  so  early  as  1884  the 
future  Sirdar  of  Egypt  had  impressed  his  brother 
with  the  forcef ulness  of  his  ambition. 

But  there  was  an  element  of  tenderness  in 
Herbert  Kitchener  during  those  hard  and  toil- 
some years,  —  an  element  which  persisted  long 
after  he  was  world  famous  and  which  possibly 
exists  to  the  present  day.  Among  his  relations 
were  two  dear  diminutive  old  Scotch  ladies  who 
lived  in  Phillimore  Gardens,  Kensington,  by 
name  the  Misses  Hutchinson,  and  Kitchener  was 
no  dearer  to  these  charming  spinsters  than  they 
to  him.  He  wrote  to  them  brightly  and  boyishly 
by  almost  every  mail,  and  whenever  he  returned 
to  London  the  house  in  Phillimore  Gardens  was 
not  only  his  regular  headquarters,  but  the  first 
goal  at  which  he  aimed.  Before  he  went  to  Egypt 
for  his  advance  to  Khartoum  these  dear  old 
ladies  presented  him  with  a  gold-headed  swagger 
cane,  and  when  the  advance  was  accomplished 

93 


KITCHENER 

and  the  photographer  arrived  to  make  a  picture 
of  the  general  and  his  staff,  Kitchener  seated  him- 
self in  the  centre  of  the  group  with  this  stick  held 
so  ostentatiously  that  the  old  ladies  in  Kensington 
could  not  fail  to  recognize  it  when  the  photograph 
appeared  in  the  illustrated  papers.  That,  I  think, 
is  a  charming  touch  in  the  man  of  blood  and  iron. 
He  sent  them  roses  from  Gordon's  grave  at 
Khartoum  and  coats  of  the  Khalifa  from  the 
Sudan.  When  he  returned  to  London  in  a  blaze 
of  glory,  the  arrangements  made  for  his  recep- 
tion would  not  admit  of  his  proceeding  immedi- 
ately to  the  house  of  his  old  friends;  but  he  wrote 
to  them  in  the  midst  of  his  lionizing,  explaining 
the  reasons  for  his  delay,  and  adding,  "But  I  am 
coming  soon,  and  I  hope  you  will  give  me  a  jolly 
tea  like  the  teas  of  old  days  —  bread  and  jam, 
and  no  people."  They  called  him  Herbert,  pro- 
nouncing it  "Hairburrt,"  and  they  would  sit  one 
on  either  side  of  him,  studying  his  bronzed  face 
with  their  small,  smiling,  shrewd  eyes,  teasing 
him,  chaffing  him,  adoring  him,  and  giving  him 
sound  advice.  In  their  house  he  was  like  a  school- 
boy, running  up  the  stairs  two  at  a  time,  whis- 
tling in  his  bedroom,  going  in  and  out  just  as  he 
pleased,  and  telling  them  such  stories  of  his  cam- 
paign as  no  one  else  in  London  ever  heard  — 
stories,  I  am  afraid,  lost  to  the  future  biographer, 

94 


LORD  KITCHENER 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

for  the  Misses  Hutchinson  are  no  longer  the  good 
angels  of  mortality. 

These  charming  old  ladies  lived  to  see  their 
hero's  success  in  South  Africa,  and  I  know  a  story 
of  Kitchener's  setting  out  for  the  campaign  which 
deserves  to  be  told.  The  spinsters,  who  rejoiced 
in  his  peerage,  thought  it  would  be  a  fine  thing 
to  send  him  a  riding-whip  for  this  campaign,  and 
they  took  cab  to  Piccadilly  and  ordered  a  very 
handsome  whip  with  a  gold  handle  ornamented 
with  a  coronet,  the  letter  "K"  and  the  word 
"Pretoria."  When  the  whip  was  ready  to  be 
sent,  they  paid  a  second  visit  to  the  shop,  a  visit 
of  inspection,  and  examined  the  present  with 
minute  carefulness  and  a  slow,  grudging,  and 
canny  approval.  "Yes,"  said  the  humorous- 
minded  tradesman,  pointing  to  the  coronet  and 
the  "K,"  "I  fancy  old  Kruger  will  be  very  well 
pleased  with  it  when  he  gets  it  into  his  hand,"  — 
a  jest  which  threw  the  old  ladies  into  a  condition 
of  the  very  greatest  indignation,  for  they  were 
Scotch,  and  therefore  something  superstitious. 

Kitchener  once  offered  to  give  these  faithful 
friends  one  of  the  many  gold  caskets  which  had 
been  presented  to  him  by  the  grateful  corpora- 
tions of  provincial  cities.  The  old  ladies  consulted 
together  as  to  the  acceptance  of  the  gift.  One 
of  them  asked,  "Do  we  need  it?"  The  other 

95 


KITCHENER 

said,  "No,  we  certainly  don't  need  it."  "What 
could  we  do  with  it?"  asked  the  first.  "Hum," 
replied  the  contemplative  other,  "we  could  per- 
haps use  it  as  a  tea-caddy." 

Other  friends  have  been  as  greatly  devoted  to 
Kitchener,  and  to  these  other  friends  he  has 
been  equally  faithful.  When  he  was  at  Simla, 
and  at  a  time  when  he  was  exceedingly  busy,  one 
of  his  friends  died  at  Lahore.  As  soon  as  the  news 
reached  him,  Kitchener  started  off  from  Simla, 
not  to  be  present  at  the  funeral,  but  to  comfort 
the  widow  of  his  friend,  a  woman  for  whom  he 
entertained  great  respect  and  affection.  The 
idea  that  Kitchener  is  a  woman-hater  is  false, 
and  has  its  origin  only  in  a  busy  man's  natural 
distaste  for  chatter  and  frivolity.  It  is  said  that 
Queen  Victoria  challenged  him  on  this  question, 
anxious  to  arrange  a  match  for  the  triumphant 
young  general,  and  that  Kitchener  replied,  "But 
I  love  one  woman  already,  ma'am,  and  always 
have  loved  her."  Here  was  romance  and  mys- 
tery. The  old  Queen  raised  her  head.  "Who  is 
she?"  asked  Victoria.  "Your  Majesty,"  replied 
Kitchener. 

Some  of  Kitchener's  most  intimate  friends  are 
women.  I  suppose,  for  instance,  that  few  people 
know  more  of  his  character  than  Lady  Salisbury 
and  Lady  Desborough,  to  name  only  two  of  his 

96 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

friends  among  women.  He  was  a  great  friend,  as 
we  have  said  already,  of  Lady  Curzon.  That  he 
is  not  in  any  sense  a  lady's  man  is  happily  true, 
but  that  he  dislikes  intelligent,  sympathetic,  and 
good  women  is  entirely  false.  Moreover,  to  tell 
a  little-known  truth,  he  has  been  in  love,  and  has 
proposed  marriage:  but  in  this  campaign  he  failed 
to  organize  victory. 

Two  things  have  beaten  Lord  Kitchener,  —  a 
woman  and  a  pond.  Of  the  woman  we  have  said 
enough;  she  is  delightful,  pretty,  and  very  clear- 
headed; she  liked  K.  of  K.,  was  proud  of  his 
friendship,  but  could  not  be  subdued  by  his  will. 
She  is  now  married,  and  is  one  of  the  great  host- 
esses of  London. 

With  less  restraint  we  can  speak  of  the  pond. 
Lord  Kitchener  has  three  hobbies;  he  is  a  collec- 
tor, an  architect,  and  a  gardener.  Above  every- 
thing else  he  loves  altering  and  improving  a  house 
or  a  garden,  particularly  a  house,  and  he  really 
does  this  difficult  and  delicate  work  very  well 
indeed.  At  Simla  he  set  about  improving  Snow- 
don,  the  official  residence  of  the  commander-in- 
chief ,  and  succeeded  in  making  this  rather  com- 
monplace and  trivial  building  a  very  fine  and 
handsome  palace.  He  made  like  improvements, 
but  on  a  smaller  scale,  in  his  country  house  at 
Simla,  Wildflower  Hall.  Here  he  built  a  fine 

97 


KITCHENER 

library,  and  panelled  the  walls,  embellishing  the 
panels  with  the  coats  of  arms  of  the  great  Indian 
princes  —  a  fine  exhibition  of  good  taste  and  a 
telling  stroke  in  diplomacy.  But  he  wanted  to 
improve  the  garden  of  Snowdon,  and  nothing 
would  satisfy  him  in  the  midst  of  the  garden  but 
a  pond.  Now  Simla  is  high  up  in  the  Himalayas, 
and  to  make  a  pond  in  the  Snowdon  garden  was 
a  more  difficult  matter  than  to  construct  the 
dam  at  Assouan.  But  K.  had  spoken,  and  the 
impossible  was  attempted.  Every  effort  failed. 
Kitchener  came  and  surveyed  the  wreck.  "Send 
for  a  buffalo,"  he  commanded.  A  buffalo  was 
brought  up  from  the  plains  below,  and  for  a  num- 
ber of  days  walked  round  and  round  in  the  em- 
bryonic pond,  puddling  the  soil.  Then  it  fell  over 
the  khud,  or  precipice,  and  perished  miserably. 
"Send  for  oxen,"  said  K.  Oxen  came  and  tram- 
pled the  resisting  bottom  of  the  postulated  but 
effectively  expostulating  pond,  trampling  it, 
trampling  it,  and  trampling  it  till  winter  came, 
when  they  died  of  pneumonia.  To  this  day  the 
very  beautiful  gardens  of  Snowdon  are  waterless. 
In  his  garden,  wherever  he  may  be,  Kitchener 
is  accustomed  to  do  a  great  deal  of  the  work. 
Officers  who  come  to  report  to  him  are  always 
glad  when  the  interview  is  conducted  in  this 
fashion,  for  Kitchener  is  more  human  in  a  gar- 

98 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

den,  and  when  one  walks  at  his  side,  even  at  six 
o'clock  in  the  morning  when  he  begins  his  day's 
work,  the  nerves  are  not  called  upon  to  bear  the 
strain  of  meeting  his  eyes.  In  his  garden  at  Simla 
he  has  expressed  to  officers  very  close  to  him  the 
pain  it  causes  him  to  dismiss  a  man,  even  when 
the  offender  is  guilty  of  a  serious  fault.  Without 
compunction  he  gets  rid  of  the  inefficient  and 
the  studiously  stupid,  but  it  really  hurts  him  to 
punish  a  good  man  who  has  blundered.  In  one 
particular  case  of  which  I  know,  it  was  a  matter 
of  days  before  he  could  make  up  his  mind  to 
dismiss  such  a  man. 

About  the  eyes  of  Kitchener  it  may  be  said 
without  offence  that  the  terror  they  inspire  is 
heightened  by  a  squint  which  has  tended  to  grow 
more  pronounced  with  age.  The  eyes  are  blue, 
penetrating,  and  full  of  judgment;  without  their 
irregularity  they  would  be  difficult  eyes  to  face, 
but  with  this  irregularity  they  fill  certain  men 
with  a  veritable  paralysis  of  terror.  Some  one 
who  knows  him  very  well  has  described  to  me 
the  effect  of  those  eyes  upon  people  who  meet  him 
for  the  first  time.  "They  strike  you,"  I  was  told, 
"with  a  kind  of  clutching  terror;  you  look  at 
them,  try  to  say  something,  look  away,  and  then, 
trying  to  speak,  find  your  eyes  returning  to  that 
dreadful  gaze,  and  once  more  choke  with  silence." 

99 


KITCHENER 

Another  person,  a  man  of  very  great  social  im- 
portance, said  to  me,  "I  have  never  felt  the  least 
dread  of  Kitchener;  he  has  stayed  with  me,  and 
has  been  perfectly  jolly  and  nice,  entering  into 
any  fun  that  was  going  on,  and  being  as  larky 
and  jovial  as  the  youngest.  Moreover,  he  tells  a 
story  very  well,  particularly  a  story  against  him- 
self. No,  I  have  never  experienced  that  feeling  of 
terror  which  he  certainly  inspires  in  many  people, 
men  and  women  alike."  Then  after  a  pause,  this 
great  nobleman  said,  "All  the  same,  if  he  were 
coming  to  inspect  my  regiment  I  should  be  fright- 
ened out  of  my  life!" 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  man's  character  is 
excellently  suggested  by  a  phrase  which  a  singu- 
larly clever  and  observant  woman  used  in  de- 
scribing to  me  the  effect  he  produced  upon  her 
mind.  "He  sits  in  a  chair,"  she  said,  "as  if  it 
were  a  throne."  The  man  has  natural  dignity  of 
mind,  and  that  dignity  has  been  developed  into 
a  distinct  and  sensible  kingliness  by  the  long 
exercise  of  an  almost  autocratic  authority.  He 
has  never  leaned  on  another  man.  He  has  never 
consulted  and  taken  advice.  Always  it  has  been 
upon  his  own  brain  that  his  masterful  will  has 
depended  for  the  victory  of  his  purposes. 

But  such  men  are  sometimes  frightfully  con- 
scious of  solitude;  moments  come  to  them  when 

100 


LORD  KITCHENER  IN  HIS  ACADEMIC  GOWN 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

they  are  bowed  and  dizzied  by  the  burden  of 
responsibility.  "Ah,  if  you  only  knew,"  he  said 
to  one  of  his  closest  friends  in  Egypt,  "the  awful 
strain  of  having  to  make  up  one's  mind  in  crisis 
after  crisis,  knowing  that  on  that  one  decision 
everything  depends."  Such  moments  have  come 
to  him,  and  those  who  look  can  see  the  marks  of 
that  tremendous  strain  visible  in  his  face,  which 
is  no  longer  alert,  eager,  and  lean  with  the  pacing 
energy  of  his  brain.  On  the  whole,  however,  re- 
sponsibility and  authority  have  made  him  a 
greater  man  than  his  parts  would  have  suggested 
to  the  most  admiring  of  his  friends  forty  years 
ago. 

"K.  is  a  wonderful  administrator,"  one  of  his 
friends  told  me,  "but  he  is  not  otherwise  an  able 
man."  This  is  true.  Kitchener  is  by  no  means, 
for  instance,  a  great  general.  Again,  his  states- 
manship has  never  advanced  out  of  gun  range, 
because  it  is  entirely  without  the  genius  which 
trusts  humanity.  In  consequence  he  is  something 
of  a  bungler,  something  of  a  blunderer.  "In 
Egypt,"  I  was  told,  "he  behaved  like  a  great  bull 
in  a  china  shop.  We  used  to  call  him  K.  of  Chaos. 
The  man  was  never  any  good  except  in  making 
an  army  and  preparing  for  a  campaign."  I  do 
not  think  this  judgment  altogether  a  true  one, 
but  it  is  sufficiently  true  to  show  that  Kitchener 

101 


KITCHENER 

is  not  the  heaven-born  genius  of  popular  imagi- 
nation. He  is  a  slow,  thorough,  painstaking,  labo- 
rious, and  determined  organizer.  He  takes  a  long 
time  to  get  anywhere,  but  when  he  arrives  the 
man  on  the  spot  knows  immediately  why  he  has 
come. 

He  is  a  little  conscious,  perhaps,  that  soldiers 
do  not  regard  him  as  quite  one  of  themselves. 
He  is  said  to  be  much  more  genial  and  human 
among  his  civilian  staff  in  Egypt  than  he  has  ever 
shown  himself  when  holding  a  purely  military 
command.  It  is  as  if  the  man  were  always  on  his 
guard  with  soldiers.  Among  civil  servants,  where 
his  talents  are  indisputable,  he  unbends,  although 
he  always  sits  in  a  chair  as  if  it  were  a  throne. 
Occasionally,  even  among  his  civilians,  and  even 
at  dinner,  Kitchener  can  be  ferocious.  With 
guests  in  his  house,  a  lady  or  two  at  the  table,  he 
has  been  known  to  handle  a  man  so  angrily  and 
pitilessly  that  it  has  been  an  ordeal  of  the  nerves 
for  the  women  to  remain. 

I  will  now  tell  the  two  worst  stories  I  know 
about  Kitchener,  and  get  rid  as  quickly  as  possi- 
ble of  this  particular  aspect  of  his  character.  One 
is  of  Egypt  and  one  of  South  Africa;  both  are 
true. 

It  happened  that  Kitchener,  during  his  Egyp- 
tian command,  wanted  a  certain  bridge  to  be 

102 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

built,  and  sent  for  an  engineer  to  give  him  his 
orders.  When  the  command  was  finished,  he 
added,  "I  will  inspect  the  bridge  on ,"  nam- 
ing a  certain  date.  The  engineer  expressed  his 
doubt  whether  the  bridge  could  possibly  be  fin- 
ished in  so  short  a  time.  He  was  told  that  on  that 
day  Kitchener  would  come  to  the  spot  and  if  the 
bridge  was  not  finished  there  would  be  trouble. 
There  the  interview  ended. 

The  engineer  set  off  on  his  labour  of  Hercules. 
He  was  young,  devoted,  and  ambitious.  He 
worked  by  night  and  by  day,  did  incredible 
things,  and  at  the  moment  when  Kitchener 
arrived  had  everything  ready  for  the  inspection. 
His  eyes  shining  with  pleasure,  his  face  wet  with 
perspiration,  his  hands  still  grimed  with  the  anx- 
ious work  of  last  touches,  he  advanced  to  Kitch- 
ener, saluted,  and  said,  with  a  smile,  "Well,  sir, 
we've  just  managed  to  do  it  in  time."  The  only 
answer  he  received,  the  dreadful  eyes  fixed  upon 
him,  the  voice  cold  with  authority,  was  this: 
"Yes;  but  you  ought  not  to  appear  before  me 
unshaved." 

This  is  what  I  call  the  Prussian  element  in 
Kitchener's  character,  and  for  myself  I  hate  it  so 
much,  detest  it  so  spiritually,  that  I  would  give 
much  to  add  to  my  story  that  the  engineer  threw 
the  piece  of  cotton-waste,  on  which  he  was  wip- 

103 


KITCHENER 

ing  his  dirty  hands,  straight  into  K.'s  face,  even 
if  one  had  to  record  that  he  was  subsequently 
buried  in  close  proximity  to  his  bridge.  Never- 
theless, I  remind  myself  that  Kitchener  is  a  man 
burdened  with  responsibility,  that  the  East  is  not 
good  for  the  liver,  and  that  perhaps  something 
had  occurred  that  day  to  put  him  out.  But  I 
don't  like  to  hear  that  when  this  story  was  retold 
to  Kitchener  in  after  years  he  laughed  heartily. 
It  would  have  been  rather  nice  to  record  that  he 
covered  his  face  with  his  hands. 

The  other  story  is  this.  During  the  war  in 
South  Africa  it  was  necessary  on  a  certain  occa- 
sion for  Kitchener  to  make  a  quick  and  highly 
perilous  journey  by  train.  A  daring  and  high- 
spirited  youngster  volunteered  to  drive  the  en- 
gine. The  journey  was  accomplished.  The  vol- 
unteer driver,  delighted  that  he  had  got  the  great 
general  safely  through  most  dangerous  country, 
said  to  Kitchener  as  the  Chief  of  the  Staff  passed 
him  standing  beside  his  sweating  engine  —  "We 
weren't  very  long,  sir,  were  we?"  To  which 
K.  of  K.  replied,  scarce  looking  at  him,  "You'll 
have  to  be  quicker  going  back." 

Well,  it's  horrid  and  odious  and  uncivilized, 
but  this  is  undeniable,  that  such  a  spirit  does  get 
things  done,  and  without  such  a  spirit  no  one 
man  perhaps  could  produce  efficiency  over  a 

104 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

tremendously  wide  and  infinitely  difficult  field. 
Kitchener,  I  think,  is  not  brutal  by  nature,  but, 
as  we  have  said,  has  acquired  brutality  in  the 
course  of  his  journey  from  a  big  job  to  a  bigger, 
and  from  a  bigger  to  a  still  bigger. 

Of  his  personal  courage  there  can  be  no  ques- 
tion, nor  of  his  sacrifice  of  himself  in  the  public 
interest.  If  he  has  spared  no  man,  never  has  he 
spared  himself.  If  he  has  exposed  other  men  to 
danger,  he  himself  in  the  face  of  the  most  immi- 
nent death  has  remained  calm  and  indifferent. 
During  a  serious  time  in  Egypt,  only  a  year  ago, 
he  was  sitting  one  evening  with  some  friends  in 
the  courtyard  of  his  house  when  a  fanatic  sud- 
denly sprang  through  the  dusk  into  the  midst  of 
the  group  and  waving  his  right  hand  above  his 
head  seemed  as  if  he  were  about  to  hurl  a  bomb 
straight  at  Kitchener's  head.  Kitchener,  I  am  told 
by  two  persons  who  were  present,  never  moved 
a  muscle,  never  turned  a  hair.  He  remained 
exactly  as  he  had  been  a  moment  before,  occupy- 
ing his  chair  as  if  it  were  a  throne,  and  showing 
not  the  smallest  concern  for  his  safety.  The 
madman,  who  carried  no  bomb,  was  caught  and 
removed,  and  K.  of  K.  went  on  with  the  conver- 
sation. 

A  German  officer  who  accompanied  the  British 
troops  in  Egypt  said  of  Kitchener:   "Personal 

105 


KITCHENER 

danger  does  not  seem  to  exist  for  him,  although 
he  has  nothing  whatever  of  the  braggart  about 
him.  His  entry  into  Omdurman  was  madly  ven- 
turesome, but  there  was  something  almost  comic 
about  his  calm,  when,  for  instance,  he  lit  a  ciga- 
rette, carefully  considering  which  way  the  wind 
blew,  while  bullets  were  whizzing  all  round  him, 
and  this,  in  his  case,  is  not  playing  to  the  gallery, 
it  is  simply  the  man's  natural  manner." 

The  chief  and  distinguishing  trait  of  his  inner- 
most character  is  a  love  of  altering  things,  a  dis- 
position probably  inherited  from  his  land- 
improving  father.  He  never  quite  approves  of 
other  people's  work.  His  way  is  always  the  better 
way.  Once  in  Egypt,  when  two  great  ladies  from 
England  were  staying  at  the  Agency,  he  took 
these  distinguished  guests  to  see  the  magnificent 
ball-room  which  he  had  just  added  to  the  rather 
mean  official  residence  of  the  British  Agent.  A 
number  of  natives  were  on  their  hands  and  knees 
polishing  the  floor  in  unison.  K.  of  K.  regarded 
them  for  a  moment  or  two,  and  then  striding  for- 
ward told  them  that  their  method  was  the  wrong 
method  and  that  the  best  way  of  polishing  a  floor 
was  in  such  a  fashion.  The  natives  altered  their 
positions,  got  ready  to  work  in  the  new  order, 
and  then  started.  The  next  moment  they  were 
a  broken  and  disorganized  line,  some  of  them 

106 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

sprawling  and  rolling  on  the  floor.  The  two  ladies 
laughed  at  this  tableau.  "Do  it  your  own  way," 
commanded  Kitchener,  and  the  scowl  on  his  face 
very  effectually  expressed  his  chagrin.  Certainly 
he  disapproved  of  the  spontaneous  laughter  of 
his  guests. 

In  many  instances  his  alterations  have  been 
great  and  valuable  improvements.  The  hobby 
nearest  to  his  heart  is  architecture,  and  on 
Broome  Park,  his  place  near  Canterbury,  made 
famous  by  Ingoldsby,  he  has  expended  infinite 
labour  and  no  little  money.  As  an  evidence  of  his 
diligence  in  this  work  and  his  thoroughness  in 
detail,  it  may  be  related  that  he  spent  several 
days  with  Lord  and  Lady  Sackville  at  Knole  — 
probably  the  most  perfect  house  in  the  whole 
world  —  taking  impressions  of  the  carvings  with 
sheets  of  wet  blotting-paper.  He  would  spend 
hours  at  this  work,  a  lady  standing  by  with  water, 
and  scarcely  any  words  escaped  his  lips  during 
the  operation  except  the  command,  "More 
water." 

He  wanted  to  see  the  interior  of  Rufford  Hall, 
and,  staying  in  the  neighbourhood,  asked  his 
hostess  to  drive  him  over.  The  lady  told  him  that 
Lord  and  Lady  Savile  were  away,  and  that  for 
a  very  good  and  somewhat  delicate  reason  the 
house  was  never  shown.  Kitchener  persisted  in 

107 


KITCHENER 

his  request,  but  the  lady  persisted  in  her  refusal. 
One  day,  without  a  word  to  his  hostess,  he 
ordered  a  car,  drove  over  to  Rufford,  where  he 
found  only  an  old  woman  in  charge,  and  suc- 
ceeded in  forcing  an  entry.  He  told  the  story  at 
dinner  that  night,  laughing  boisterously  at  his 
ruse;  but  the  lady,  need  we  say,  did  not  join  in 
his  laughter. 

His  love  for  Broome  is  now  the  dearest  affec- 
tion of  his  heart.  During  the  alterations,  which 
he  superintends  very  closely,  he  resides  in  an 
unused  gardener's  cottage,  among  exceedingly 
shabby  surroundings,  and  lives  with  scarcely 
more  luxury  than  you  find  at  the  table  of  an  agri- 
cultural labourer.  "  You  don't  know  what  it  costs 
me  to  leave  Broome,"  he  said,  with  real  feeling, 
the  last  time  he  went  back  to  Egypt.  The  friend 
to  whom  he  made  this  remark  told  me  that  he 
was  like  a  schoolboy  going  back  from  delightsome 
holidays  to  the  grind  of  school. 

With  this  love  of  altering,  extending,  and  im- 
proving houses  and  gardens,  there  goes  the  cupid- 
ity of  the  collector.  Lord  Kitchener  knows  a  good 
deal  about  silver  and  china,  a  little  about  furni- 
ture, and  he  is  a  furious  collector.  I  was  told  by 
an  incomparable  judge  that  he  has  knowledge 
but  not  taste.  However  this  may  be,  he  has, 
beyond  all  question,  the  passion  of  a  collector, 

108 


and  will  do  almost  anything  to  get  possession  of 
an  object  of  his  desire.  His  friends  frankly  tell 
him  that  he  visits  them  chiefly  for  loot,  and  he 
has  been  told  to  his  face,  good-humouredly  of 
course,  that  he  is  an  incorrigible  cadger.  Many 
people  are  strong  enough  to  ignore  his  hints  and 
to  refuse  his  beggings;  but  it  is  not  so  easy  for 
those  who  happen  to  be  his  official  inferiors  to 
refuse  him  the  piece  for  which  he  hints  steadily 
and  with  increasing  emphasis.  I  am  told  that  this 
habit  of  the  collector  has  grown  with  the  years, 
is  exceedingly  unpleasant,  and  appears  to  be 
quite  incurable.  His  collection  of  swords  is  said 
to  be  one  of  the  finest  in  the  world. 

Lord  Kitchener  is  neither  an  effective  speaker 
nor  a  great  writer.  But  he  has  two  epigrams  and 
one  humorous  remark  which  he  is  said  to  fire  off, 
watching  eagerly  for  their  effect,  at  every  fresh 
European  visitor  to  Cairo.  The  first  sententious 
epigram  is  this:  "The  future  of  Egypt  is  hi 
Abyssinia."  The  second:  "I  started  life  as  a 
consul :  it  has  taken  me  forty  years  to  get  my- 
self made  a  consul-general."  The  humorous  re- 
mark, made  to  people  who  talk  to  him  about 
Egyptian  art,  is  as  follows:  "I  don't  think  much 
of  the  art  of  a  people  who  for  four  thousand  years 
have  drawn  cats  in  precisely  the  same  way." 

It  has  been  related  of  him — but  I  doubt  the 
109 


KITCHENER 

truth  of  the  story — that  to  a  man  who  began  call- 
ing him  Kitchener  very  soon  after  introduction, 
the  Sirdar  put  the  sudden  question,  "Why  not 
Herbert,  for  short?" 

Two  other  things  really  said  by  Lord  Kitchener 
may  be  recorded.  Speaking  at  a  dinner  of  the 
East  Anglians  after  his  smashing  of  the  Mahdi, 
he  said  that  he  was  delighted  to  be  welcomed 
home  by  brother  Anglians,  who  evidently  did  not 
hold  the  ancient  belief  that  a  prophet  had  no 
honour  in  his  own  country.  "I  cannot  claim  to 
be  a  prophet,"  he  continued,  "but  I  have  been 
engaged  recently  in  upsetting  one,  —  one  who  is 
now  being  received  in  his  own  country  with  a  far 
different  and  perhaps  warmer  reception  than  that 
which  I  have  the  honour  to  receive  to-night." 
The  other  remark  was  made  quite  spontaneously 
to  a  man  of  my  acquaintance.  Kitchener  was 
speaking  of  his  early  days,  and  of  the  impressions 
made  upon  him  forty  years  ago  by  all  the  beauty, 
and  silence,  and  mystery  of  the  East.  "Damas- 
cus," he  said,  "made  the  profoundest  impression; 
I  continually  see  it  even  now,  and  exactly  as  I 
saw  it  then  —  it  presents  itself  to  my  mind  in  per- 
fect miniature  as  if  I  were  looking  at  the  city  it- 
self, but  through  the  wrong  end  of  a  telescope." 

He  does  not  seem  to  be  a  great  reader.  He  has 
studied  with  fair  thoroughness  the  curious  notes 

110 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

of  Richard  Burton  to  the  "Nights,"  and  he  is 
occasionally  interested  by  a  modern  novel,  par- 
ticularly imaginative  novels  masquerading  as 
future  history  with  the  trappings  of  science.  But 
he  is  no  judge  of  a  book,  and  does  not  seem  to 
care  a  straw  for  the  higher  regions  of  literature. 

One  need  not  bore  the  reader  by  a  summing-up. 
It  is  fairly  obvious  that  this  man,  who  stands 
just  at  present  so  totally  and  bracingly  for  the 
whole  British  Empire,  is  neither  romantic  hero 
nor  heaven-sent  genius.  But  also  it  is  plain,  I 
hope,  that  he  is  neither  the  absolute  tyrant  nor 
the  bloodless  machine  of  popular  fancy.  He  is  a 
simple,  not  very  amiable,  and  occasionally  a  dis- 
tinctly unpleasant  official,  who  by  the  concentra- 
tion of  his  will  in  a  narrow  groove,  and  by  inces- 
sant, slow,  unsparing,  and  plodding  labour  has 
achieved  great  and  enormous  victories.  But 
within  the  man  himself  there  is  a  certain  dig- 
nity of  soul,  not  white-robed  and  transfigured,  it 
is  true,  but  stiff  with  buckram  and  heavy  with 
gold-lace,  which  gives  a  real  weight,  a  genuine 
authority,  to  the  impression  he  makes  upon 
even  considerable  people. 

Married  to  a  woman  who  realized  that  history 
is  spiritual  progress,  and  that  lordship,  in  spite 
of  cocks'  feathers  and  scarlet,  is  only  the  police 
of  civilization,  Lord  Kitchener  might  have  been 

111 


KITCHENER 

one  of  the  greatest  officials  in  modern  English 
history.  But  he  is  a  man  who  does  not  inspire 
the  love  of  women,  he  has  no  spiritual  ideals,  no 
inspiration,  and  all  his  work  has  been  charac- 
terized by  so  exclusive  a  masculinity  that  it  is 
almost  certain  posterity  will  not  be  greatly  curi- 
ous about  him.  He  will  live  in  the  shadows  with 
Wellington,  not  in  the  sunlight  with  Nelson  and 
Napoleon. 

His  service  to  his  generation,  however,  has 
been  nobly  rendered,  the  living  world  owes  him 
gratitude,  and  perhaps  if  the  two  little  old  ladies 
of  Phillimore  Gardens  could  rise  to  tell  us  all  they 
know  about  him  we  might  add  to  our  gratitude 
the  warmer  and  kinder  feeling  of  affectionate 
admiration.  For  we  know  that  if  Kitchener  has 
made  enemies,  he  has  also  grappled  to  his  side 
one  or  two  great  and  steady  friends  who  find  in 
him  not  only  a  powerful  official  and  a  remarkably 
able  administrator,  but  a  man  whose  friendship 
is  a  very  pleasant  possession. 


THE   END 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .   S   .  A 


THE  DIPLOMACY  OF 
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1.  The  Beginning  of  the  War 

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